I Saw This!! What I have been watching - 2025 edition (Part C)

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our [retired?] feature wherein Kent(!) or Toasty attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. But we can't not write cuz that would be bad, very bad.  

What I Have Been (or Am) Watching is the admitted state of me (usually Toast, but Kent this time) spending too much time in front of the TV and not writing about it. Bad Kent! Bad! But it's in part because Kent is tired and busy can't review everything.

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Murderbot Season 1 - 2025, AppleTV (10/10 episodes watched)
created by Paul and Chris Weitz

We went most of the year without AppleTV this year and so Murderbot sat on an idle list of *maybe* titles titles to watch. 

A friend of mine was very, very highly anticipating Murderbot's debut on AppleTV. She had read the book(s?) and absolutely loved them. I didn't have the heart then to tell her that loving a book is all but guaranteed to lead do disappointment with the adaptation. Sure enough, after it started airing (???what do we call it when a show is released week to week on a streaming service...it's not going over airwaves anymore...) I didn't hear anything more from her about it. 

It was a show that certainly in my regular TV reviewing circle of reading didn't come up a heck of a lot, so my excitement for it was low... also I knew nothing about it, and based on title alone I conjured up all sorts of '90's Image Comics-style "extreme" sci-fi for manchildren ideas of what it could be about. I was not excited in the least.

When we finally reacquired AppleTV, I added Murderbot to my "to watch" list, but there were other shows (The Studio, Slow Horses, Down Cemetary Road, Stick, Platonic) that I intended to watch first... and then I noticed that Murderbot was not a drama, but a sci-fi comedy, with only half hour episodes, and suddenly it shot to the top of my list. It was like my expectations of having wade through 10 hours of meathead sci-fi suddenly came at a limited-time-only discount of 4 1/2 hours of mid-budget science fiction comedy. I was all in on a binge.

The show is set in a distant future in a galaxy where the government is primarily run by mega-corporations (if it were licensed by Disney/Fox they could have set this in the Weyland-Yutani of the Alien universe). An independent socialist commune has petitioned the people in charge to do research work on a remote planet, and in being granted access, they've been given a Security Unit (SecUnit) to protect them against their objections (these future hippies see SecUnits as a form of slavery). What they don't know is their SecUnit has overridden its security protocols and has achieved full sentience and named itself Murderbot (not because it has murdered so many, but it just kind of fantasizes about it).

Murderbot is our point of view character in the series. Played by Alexander Skarsgård, Murderbot is our narrator in this real. He is often narrating directly to the audience, and sometimes we as the audience are just privy to his inner thoughts. Murderbot is familiar enough with the nature of humans to know to disguise his sentience from them, so he plays the role of SecUnit to his new charges, but with spite and insolence in his fluid-pumping veins. He would rather just be watching his favourite sci-fi soap opera (which is what he's often doing when he's supposed to be on task). He's always spying on what they're up to and he's, well, disgusted by every ounce of them.

And yet he can't help but protect them as danger arises (for if he doesn't, he's bound to be seen as defective and turned to scrap). In his efforts to serve this absurd group of characters he invariably performs too far afield from the norms of his standard functions, and they pick up on it. But instead of finding vicious humans ready to turn on him, he finds a group of people mostly willing to accept him as one of them. Except he's not one of them, and he doesn't particularly desire to be one of them. He just desires to be free, to be himself, to do as he pleases in the confines of the society he exists in.

Murderbot is quite a funny show, largely centred around Murderbot's distaste for the people he's with, but also the absurdity of the people he's with (which includes a newly formed throuple that is never not awkward, and the senior member of the crew who treats Murderbot kindly even before he's revealed as a sentient). But Murderbot's greatest strength is in its representation of neurodivergence. Murderbot is almost entirely autism-coded (outside of the origins of and physiology as a SecUnit of course), and the level of which his autism is explored, how he engaged and disengages with others, how he can't make eye contact and disassociates when conversations get boring, and how he masks himself...presenting in a way that is expected of him rather than how he actually desires to be. I can't recall ever seeing an autistic character presented with this level of detail and care, certainly not as the protagonist of a series, not without making their autism a superpower, anyway.  Here, Murderbot's neurodivergence is in no way a superpower, despite Murderbot being superpowerful.

David Dastmalchian's member of the crew has cybernetic enhancements, and he clashes with Murderbot a lot. His character is also spectrum-coded, and it's the genius of the story (not sure if it's something the Weitz brothers have crafted or if it is in the source material) but it really shows that being on the spectrum is not the same for everyone. There are varying ways that neurodivergence presents itself in this series, and it's amazing how adeptly it presents it in the form of a sci-fi comedy.  I definitely was not expecting that.

I was talking with my friend again recently about the show, the one who had anticipated its debut. She found it disappointing, and relayed how fan reaction to the show was pretty muted because it wasn't like the book exactly (which I'm told is fully first person narrative). But she also hadn't picked up on the autism coding of the character, and that really made me wonder whether that was in the source material, and how many people just didn't pick up on that. To me it's the center of the show, the story is about a neurodivergent character being able to come out, to stop masking, to be who they are and find acceptance and life outside of expectations. Perhaps my being a member of a neurodivergent household has me hyperaware of this aspect but it's something the show should be lauded for.

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Stranger Things 5 - 2025, Netflix (7/8 episodes watched)
created by the Duffer Brother
ST 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Stranger Things debuted in 2016, the second series in 2017, and the third in 2019. And then three years until Stranger Things 4, and now, another three years later, the final series, released in three parts.

I was tremendously excited for the drop of each preceding series on Netflix, anticipating the start of a binge watch day and date of its release. Even as series four came under criticism for bloated, overlong episodes, I found myself mostly entertained, mostly excited, mostly happy to be within the realm of Stranger Things again.

This time has felt very, very different. After the end of series four I felt mostly satiated, even as there were cliffhangers and dangling threads, it was the first time I felt done and not in immediate want of more (perhaps it was the bloated runtimes, it was too big of a meal?). Rather than set an alarm for the drop of series five, I let the show just linger in my Netflix queue. The streamer would loudly proclaim to me every time I would open it up that STRANGER THINGS 5 IS HERE! Yeah Netflix, I know... I'll get to it.

Seriously, where's the apathy coming from? This I don't know.

But upon entering the world of Hawkins and the Upside Down again, I was hoping to be whisked away like I had been four times before, just fully transported into an 80's-inspired horror-scifi-fantasy realm, but I wasn't, at least not to the same effect.

When that still exceptional open theme kicks in and the "camera" tracks around the font of the Stranger Things logo, I remember the tingling sensation I got the first time I saw it, I remember the goosebumps and arm hairs standing on end, I remember how exhilarated I was by it. I remember it, but I don't feel it anymore.

We get into the world of Hawkins and I see Mike and Will and Lucas and Dustin and Eleven and Max and... these children are now adults. They've aged 10 years since we first saw them, and yet in story time, they've aged maybe 4 or 5 years, and there's a huge discrepancy there, huge hurdles to get over in one's mind. Not to mention the fact that we've seen some of these young performers now expand well beyond their roles in this series, and they're not quite the same kids that we'd last left. But is just it that they have  physically grown, or do they not actually feel like high school seniors? Do they now seem like adults play acting as kids? Is it a Pen15 situation?

Beyond that, we're back to the big bad Vecna being the big bad once again. Our heroes defeated him already and now they have to do it again? I'm not a big D&D player, so I don't know how often one faces the same main adversary back-to-back, but it doesn't quite seem like an escalation. Vecna's plan is now world-ending, so I guess the stakes have been raised. We actually do get an escalation, but it's only in the finale that the escalation is learned by our heroes and we see the heart of the matter. It's way too late a reveal, and should have been presented in the first or second episode of the season.

If the plot is maybe not holding up its end of the bargain, the character work has stepped up to become the centerpiece of the show this season. There's tensions and unions within friendships and relationship, there's traumas to unpack and revelations to make, and these are the best moments in the series. Will Byers, who has experienced so much trauma, and felt very much like the fifth wheel of the series is given the spotlight this season, and his coming out moment, while grinding the momentum of the plot to a halt, is really a beautiful thing, as is Robin gay-mentoring him. Likewise Dustin and Steve persist at being the best duo in the show for years, acting like a bickering married couple who eventually find their love for each other again. And then there's Nancy and Jonathan who... well, lets just say the show finally gets that relationship right by the end.

Stranger Things has, each season, seen fit to expand its cast and to uplift members of its cast who maybe haven't had the time to shine before. This season digs into to the youngest member of the Wheeler clan, Nancy and Mike's younger sister Holly, and her classmates (especially Dipshit/Delightful Derek), and even giving mother Wheeler Karen some big moments.  This season highlights what an ensemble the show has become, and there are whole scenes with a dozen or more cast members, and frankly that's pretty heartwarming occasion seeing all these people in a room together. The show remembers the big players and the small players, and, really, it seems the only character it hasn't done justice to is Barb... unless Barb is the deus ex machina of the final episode...[spoiler...she's not].

When I watch Stranger Things now, I feel a sense of comfort being there, but I'm not excited by it like I once was. Series five looks big and epic and expensive (Frank Darabont directing a lot of the season bringing his extensive Stephen King adaptation experience to it) and it certainly holds my interest plus it had a couple surprises up its sleeve, but watching it felt a lot like going through the motions. A lot of scenes felt overlong for the message they were trying to get across, and often the messages are repeated too many times (I exclaimed out loud "we get it" at least twice this season). As I've been waiting between mini-drops for the next episodes, I've kind of forgotten what's happened in the preceding.

If Stranger Things had run its course over the span of five or six years instead of nine or ten, it would feel very different than it does now. With the permission of time that Netflix has granted their cash cow, series four and five have gotten indulgent, glossy and it's lost the scrappy feel it had when it started (see also franchise bloat like the Mission:Impossible or Fast & Furious series). Had it plowed through like old style TV would have 2 decades ago, it would be an epic five seasons of 40-minute episodes that would be highly enticing rewatching. As it stands, after finishing the final episode, I have no immediate plans to return.

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Only Murders in the Building Season 5 (10/10 episodes watched)
created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman

Unlike Stranger Things, Only Murders... is a series that has released one season per year, year over year, with episodes consistent in length at under a half hour, and little self indulgent bloat from its creatives. But, despite what I said above for Stranger Things, that doesn't on its own make for a coherent ongoing narrative or a satisfying overall series. But then, that's not really what Only Murders... is going for.

It is a series that really didn't need to exist beyond its first season, and the more it goes on, the more it exists anything approximating reality, instead existing within its own pocket dimension. The joke is now, each season, somehow death comes to the Arconia, that gorgeous city block of condos that feels like its own world within New York City.

The part of the conceit of the show that has never worked continues to burden the show, with Mabel, Charles and Oliver having a true crime podcast that the show runners clearly have little to no experience with and/or don't care about the characters having a believable show. I mean, the trio effectively interfere with police investigations and illegally mess with crime scenes and in theory admit to it on their show. They should have been fined and/or arrested and/or shut down years ago (of course, the best recurring character on the show is their exasperated detective acquaintance Detective Williams played by Da'Vine Joy Randolph who seems to shield them from any scrutiny beyond her own).

This season the crew investigate the murder of their beloved concierge Lester, only to discover that this season's big guest stars (Renee Zellweger, Christoph Waltz, and Logan Lerman), a trio of billionaires, are involved somehow, and then the other guest stars (Bobby Cannavale, Tea Leone, and Dianne Wiest) are perhaps involved in some sort of mafioso and a hidden casino.

The formulae remains the same, each episode the trio try to pin the deed on someone and we get their story so as to eliminate them as a suspect, wash and repeat. In the background this season is Oliver's potential moving away to be with new bride Loretta (Meryl Streep) and the billionaires buying out the building and evacuating them all. Frankly, unlike Stranger Things the character-focussed aspects of the show feel shoehorned in quite frequently and conflict between them never feels natural. It's at its best when it has a good, twisty mystery, big guest stars, and Steve Martin and Martin Short get to be goofballs and  Selena Gomez gets to be sarcastic. This season's highlight was Tea Leoni's quintet of meathead sons and how they seem to operate as a single disfunctional, dimwitted unit.

It's never been a particularly sharp series, and it just gets more blunted with each season. This season's jabs at billionaires (in the impending eat the rich culture war) are total weak lil love taps, plus the plight the characters face in this season seems like problems of the privileged, and the introduction of a robot doorman never fully manifested into any meaningful contemplation of AI replacing blue collar workers, not much original comedy. The mystery of the season was all over the place, and frankly not all that engrossing, and yet, all that said, it's hard not to be charmed by all the talent and charisma on screen.  I'll be back for season six.

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Some other things I watched late last year but didn't complete or don't have a whole heck of a lot to say about:

Eyes of Wakanda (Disney+, 3/4 episodes watched) is meant to expand upon the world of Wakanda from the two Black Panther movies. Each episode is set in a different time period, and there's no connective tissues between them. They're not bad, per se, but their 20-ish minute run times give them little opportunity to meaningfully develop characters, relationships, and a story necessitating a big action setpieces. The big "wow" of this all for the Marvel nerds is the third episode which brings in Iron Fist lore without needing any familiarity with the abysmal Netflix series. A hearty "it's fine, but forgettable".

 

I really enjoyed getting to know Canadian-by-way-of-UK comedian Mae Martin on the Canadian version of Amazon's Last One Laughing, and then the fifteenth season of Taskmaster, and then their Netflix comedy special SAP and even a few episodes of The Handsome Podcast they co-host with comedians Tig Notaro and Fortune Feimster. I didn't manage to get to their Channel 4 series Feel Good, which they created, but I was very intrigued that they were branching out into thriller territory with Wayward (2025, Netflix, 2/8 episodes watched). In Wayward Martin plays a non-binary masculine cop who moves back to a small-but-progressive community where his wife (Sarah Gadon) grew up. The town seems to be under the sway of Toni Collette, who has run a local correctional facility for wayward teens for decades. Things are weird. There's a definitely unsettling vibe to the whole proceedings, but the show kind of lost me from the get-go when an errant Toronto teen was shipped across the border to this facility. I really shouldn't hold that against it, but it severely broke my investment in the story (and the second episode in which the teen's friend makes a pilgrimage to rescue her once again calls attention to it). Martin is a fascinating presence with a very distinct energy, and I'm not sure if the role fits that energy or not, but I'm having a hard time getting myself back to the series to find out. I think I was also expecting something leaning harder into horror than it does, as it's so close to being there.

Though completely unaffiliated, It's Florida, Man (Season 1 - HBO, 6/6 episodes watched) seems to be the heir apparent to the hilariously consumable Drunk History, but instead of drunk comedians trying to recount historical events which are simultaneously re-enacted by actors and comedians, here it's ripped-from-the-Florida-headlines stories, told by the people involved, re-enacted by actors and comedians. It's not quite as funny as Drunk History but it's far more absurd. It's a rubbernecker of a TV show, one that at once tries to sympathize with the participants telling their stories, but also can't help but wildly exaggerate (sometimes not so wildly) their personas for comedic effect that sometimes can feel a touch mean spirited. Because of Florida's Sunshine Laws, criminal arrests are made a matter of public record (unlike most places) and this is the reason why "Florida Man" stories are so prevalent. A show like this seems inevitable...it's a comedy show, highlighting the absurd stories of the state, but also, like, fits into true crime. It's frivolous and fun, with sometimes a weird bit of insight and/or humanizing of the weirdos it spotlights.

KWIF: Wes Anderson x Roald Dahl (+3)

KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week (ha!) I have a spotlight movie which I write a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else I watched that week I do a quick little summary of my thoughts.

This week:
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar | The Rat Catcher | The Swan | Poison (2023, d. Wes Anderson - Netflix)
World on a Wire (aka Welt am Draht) (1973, d. Rainer Werner Fassbinder - Criterion) 
The Grand Tour (1991, d. David Twohy - Bluray)
Maggie Moore(s) (2023, d. John Slattery - Netflix)

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Wes Anderson is not the most prolific of creators. Looking at his filmography, he trends at about three years between films.  We just received Asteroid City earlier this year, so this quartet of short films from Anderson was entirely unexpected, and a delightful surprise.  His films are quite obviously painstakingly crafted... not that other films aren't, but Anderson's fastidiousness in art and visual design requires exacting confluence in not just art design and technical production, but also choreography.  It's not just that the positioning of sets, props, camera, lighting, performer, etc. need to be in the exact right position, it's that they need to all move with the precision of Cirque du Soliel to achieve the effect Anderson wants.  I have speculated in the past about what drives character performance Anderson's films -- the forthright and honest, dispassionate and unfiltered way of speaking -- is either the director finds human emotion an alien concept, or else understands it so well he turns a clinical eye towards it.  I'm now wondering if it's because his films are often so clockwork in their timing, that there's no room for modulation in performance.

With these four productions, Anderson has stripped down even further the performance side of things, and upped the ante on precise, controlled movement.  These four tales to be told are each a Roald Dahl short story that Anderson is not so much adapting into a play or production, but a moving storybook.

He's ostensibly created a new genre.

Think books-on-tape, but visualized.  We see the narrator, a big-name celebrity, in costume, on a set, relaying the prose story, with visual cues of all kinds - performers interacting, props being handed or taken away by costumed stagehands, set pieces (or pieces of sets) moving to reveal new set pieces, camera movements around a set, soft transitions to stop motion animation, in-camera visual trickery, pantomime -- all in service of the verbalized narrative.  

Who is narrating can shift throughout each production, the duties lobbed around like a volleyball, but there's always a logic to the shift. Anderson has these narratives relayed at a lightning clip, to the point of being somewhat dizzying. If you get distracted, even for a second, you can lose the plot.  And with all the wonderfully captivating and clever visuals, it's hard not to be distracted.  The breakneck pacing is doubly part of the whole stage-production vibe that gives each story the air of a single take, but also necessary to keep the story contained to its sub-20-minute length.  The narrators -- Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley, Richard Ayoade, Ralph Fiennes and Rupert Friend -- all deliver the story rapidly and precisely, super enunciated, and whether it's rote memorization or reading off cue cards it's quite impressive (methinks it's the former, as eye movement and demands of performance would make cue card reading even more of a challenge.)

The four stories are:

1) The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Here the narrator switches because of a nesting doll-like tale that finds a story within a story within a story. It's ultimately the tale of a man aiming for the greatest riches he can imagine by learning the very specific discipline of seeing without seeing. It takes years for him to master it but when he does, he finds that he sees something more can be done than benefit himself, that the greatest reward in life is helping others. It's the most moralistic storybook tale of the quartet, and also the most involved production, with the most performers and elaborate set changes required. It's the greatest marvel of the four. I envy the weird kids who stumble on this absolutely curious product at a young age and watch it over and over. It is both transfixing and mind expanding.

2) The Swan. A sensitive young boy is bullied by two exceptionally nasty brutes who force him into more and more extreme situations. It is a harsh tale that exemplifies the cruelty of man towards other men and towards nature, and one's ability to, if not rise above it, then endure in spite of it. It's a melancholy tale reflecting the worst of human nature. If I take anything from this it's that we've hit a stage in children's stories in the past two or three decades where parents increasingly want to shield their children from such tales, to promise the kids a world of harmony, not harshness, and this is Anderson reminding us that it's okay... that maybe such stories teach us empathy as well as extoll the virtues of endurance and perseverance.  Anderson still loads the storytelling up with innate whimsy as a result of the production values and the preformative acts of the stagehands, but it's not even the proverbial spoonful of sugar. It's a dark tale with a small speck of glitter.

3) The Rat Catcher. A darkly comedic tale of a nasty rat-like exterminator hired to catch rats. He engages with the narrator and a garage hand, providing his insight into his profession, but also his own disturbed self. Richard Ayoade is the narrator here and, frankly, I'm surprised it took Anderson this long to collaborate with him. They seem to be a natural fit. Ralph Fiennes plays the ratcatcher here, and it is a magnificent comedic performance.  This story exemplifies best Anderson's control over the power of suggestion, using the combination narrative and pantomime to get through the most unpleasant aspects of the story.

4) Poison. An Englishman in (presumably) occupied India awakens to finds himself in a predicament with a poisonous snake asleep on his belly. His associate summons the doctor, and both endeavour to aide the man in his situation. While each of these tales is told in a rapid clip, this one utilizes its storytelling pace like a ticking time bomb, ratcheting up the tension as Dev Patel and Ben Kingsley try to diffuse the situation, while a more and more uncomfortable-looking Benedict Cumberbatch lay motionless in bed. It's easily the most exciting of the quartet's stories, but it's climax is the most sobering and potent. We think this is a whimsical story about a most tense situation, but the poison in question is the racism already in the Englishman's blood. it's toxic and spat venomously, with no easy antedote. 

I can see these not being to everyone's delight, because the form here is so radically different than what we expect from a Wes Anderson film, or from film in general. It's a new form of storytelling that I would love to see others try their hand at, having actors narrate a short story but providing staged visual accompaniment, maybe under a structured anthology.  I don't imagine it becoming a dominant form of entertainment, but it's such a bold new way to tell stories. At the very least, I would love more of this pairing of Anderson and Dahl.  It's clear the influence the author and his storytelling, has had on the director.

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Beyond his name and his profession, until a few days ago, I knew nothing about director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.  A cursory glance around the internet, he is a complicated figure at best, or the epitome of the toxic, abusive, self-destructive auteur at worst. Were he alive today, he would be cancelled.  He was a queer filmmaker but had some of his works levied as being homophobic, as well as misogynistic and sexist. Mercifully, I don't see any of that in World on a Wire.

This is my first exposure to Fassbinder, as part of Criterion's October selection of Techno Thrillers. I only just learned that the production was a two-part made-for-TVmini-series based on the Daniel F. Galouye novel "Simulacron-3", which suddenly makes much more sense to me.  I had wondered how someone like Fassbinder who was incredibly prolific (looking at his IMDB page, he had completed over 40 productions in about a 15 year career before his death) could come up with such an immaculately well-realized cyberpunk story in the early 1970s.  Of course there was a novel behind it, there had to be. And, as a production, it feels very much structured like a novel, less like TV or a movie.

Running 205 minutes, on a German TV budget, early on it seemingly feels the strain of its limitations.  The sets and wardrobe and lighting seem a bit cheap, the performers somewhat stiff, and there's just some oddness, like lack of extras or strange behaviour on screen. But moving past the 1970's German TV of it, and it starts to unveil itself... and the methodology of a craftsman comes through. There aren't special effects in this production, but through use of mirrors and windows and camera positioning or movement, Fassbinder delivers clues and cues to what's really going on. Glass is a motif throughout the production in both obvious and subtle forms. It's clear that the director is thinking both about telling the story as well as presenting it.

I had no idea cyberpunk existed as a genre prior to, like, William Gibson, but this is quite definitively a cyberpunk prototype. Our protagonist, Fred Stiller, is one of the architects of a simulated reality, where thousands of unique near-humans exist, primarily for the purpose of advancing market research for the government. Stiller's colleague mysteriously dies in an unlikely accident, after seemingly going mad, Stiller begins to question the project. When another colleague, the head of security, disappears before his very eyes, and then seems to be the only one who remembers the man, Stiller begins to question his sanity. 

It's not really a spoiler to say that Stiller learns his reality is, in fact, a simulation. It's the obvious revelation that I worried the story would spend 3 hours building towards. Instead, the clues are laid out for the audience to piece together, and for Stiller to resist the truth until he can no longer ignore it. By the mid-way point (the break between the two episodes) Stiller is aware that he is not a real person, and then it becomes about what he does with that information.

I'm blow away with this early 70's sci-fi psychological thriller and how adeptly and thoroughly it negotiates its ideas of reality, which, to me didn't seem to become part of the sci-fi conversation at large until the 90's when VR became a buzzword.  I was captivated by not just the story but the choices made in the production of the story that smartly expand on the world, and the worlds within worlds.  I was going to say I'm surprised this hasn't been remade, but Galouye's novel was also the basis for The Thirteenth Floor (1999) which I recall being a trite, subpar production. This is an utterly surprising, quality piece from a filmmaker I probably shouldn't like very much, but I'll separate the art from the artist for the time being.

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I like David Twohy's films. I think his Riddick trilogy with Vin Diesel is an over-ambitious, bonkers, action/sci-fi near-masterpiece, which is a pretty hot take, I know. I really, really like The Arrival, despite the miscasting of Charlie Sheen as a tech nerd.  He wrote Waterworld (a film I mistakenly avoided for decades), The Fugitive, and Critters 2 which is an insane resume. I'm pretty sure I have seen all the films he has written or directed except G.I. Jane and this one, The Grand Tour.

Re-released this year by Unearthed Films, I picked up the blu-ray of The Grand Tour on a recent physical media hunt because it was "A David Twohy film" I had never heard of before. It stars Jeff Daniels, but the figure on the painted box art it looked at first glance like Jeff Bridges to me, further confusing me. It also intoned time travel ("He came back from the future to save his only child from the past") so that's all I needed.

Once I unwrapped the box, and saw that the case had a reversible liner with a different image, I immediately recognized it... Timescape. This film was released in theatres as Timescape. Or, at the very least, it was advertised in comic books with that second image as Timescape. But that was still the limit of my familiarity. I had no idea what I was in for.

The Grand Tour finds widowed, alcoholic, single father Jeff Daniels still grieving his lost wife while renovating their house outside of town into a bed and breakfast.  A coach bus pulls up to his door and group of tall, attractive, odd-behavioured tourists from "California" emerge, with one demanding they stay at his establishment. A fat wad of cash ensures the transaction. These strangers are a mystery, and the way they behave raises questions that only Jeff Daniels seems curious about. Since we know the premise of the film, from the box art, involves time travel, the presumption is that they're time travelers, or aliens, or both. But why are they here?

The film delicately balances its sci-fi aspects with a very human story of a flawed and hurting man looking to keep it all together in the face of extraordinary circumstances. Daniels does a pretty amazing job at keeping the character consistent between investigating what his guests are up to, fighting his attraction to one of them, trying to be a good dad, holding his father-in-law at bay, and struggling through guilt and depression. Though we didn't talk about depression much in the early 90's, it's clearly a film that is working through it, showing that there's no easy fix but sometimes you just need to prioritize others over yourself.

I liked this quite a bit. It's a surprisingly deep story within a thrifty production that has those layers that Twohy always brings to his scripts, elevating it above the usual direct-to-video or B-movie genre pictures.  Twohy is a pretty good visual storyteller, though not exactly a stylist, and I think he trusts his writing more than his visual storytelling which may be what has held him back from being a more prominent director. This is a bit of a gem.

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I really, really like Jon Hamm as a performer. If we were in the old Hollywood system of the 40's and 50's Hamm would be cranking out four or five starring vehicles a year, one of which would be a hit while the others forgotten. As Patrick Willems mentioned recently, we don't really have that superstar leading man concept anymore, where an actor drives people to the theatres.  Post Mad Men though, Hamm (or Hamm's agents) had been pushing for that superstar leading man career resulting in a number of forgettably bland pictures ill-suited for him and his charm.  Hamm has since abandoned those aspirations, either stepping into great supporting roles where there's no pressure upon him, or leading smaller productions that are more tailored to take advantage of his persona.  Confess, Fletch is the most recent, and most winning example no doubt. 

Maggie Moore(s) is the second directorial feature of Hamm's Mad Men co-star and friend John Slattery. It is a dark comedy/crime drama about a troubled sandwich shop franchisee, Jay Moore (Micah Stock), whose life spirals out of control resulting in a hitman murdering his wife, Maggie, as well as woman of the same name. Hamm plays the widower Police Chief who is trying to make sense of the chaos.

The film co-stars Tina Fey as a neighbour to the Moores who Hamm's Chief takes a romantic interest in. Fey and Hamm have had a long history of working together (notably 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt), and there's such a natural sense of comfort between them. There may not be heavy fireworks between them, but there is a sweetness to their pairing that plays well on camera.  If I'm honest, I found the relationship drama between Fey and Hamm to be far more stimulating than the shitstorm Jay Moore gets himself into and the knots Hamm and his deputy (Ted Lasso's Nick Mohammad) try to untie. They're almost two separate films tonally, the relationship dramedy and the crime comedy, and they do seem at odds with one another.  The third act culminates in gunplay and violence that is even more tonally at odds with the rest of the production.

Positioned as a comedy by Netflix, I find it difficult to laugh when child pornography and spousal abuse are kind of instigators of the films high-jinks, and there are only a few outright chuckles found within. To its credit, the film never lost my interest, because I found Hamm held this up on his beefy shoulders pretty well, but I've seen more than a few of the muddy small-town crime-comedies over the years, and the key distinguisher of them as a subgenre is that they're all pretty forgettable. They all want to be Fargo but the only memorable one is Fargo.  The difference with Fargo is how conscious it is of its tragedy. It's a satire of human nature, how our egos tend to just dig us deeper into holes we've already dug. Maggie Moore(s)' story is trying to find humour in its horrors, and just can't escape the nature of the horrors it presents.  I think maybe if they shifted tones, did more of a Hell and High Water vibe, taking it all more seriously, it would play better...heavier, but better.

  

I Saw This!! Bid Adieu to '22 (TV Edition)

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Kent (me) or Toasty attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. But we can't not write cuz that would be bad, very bad.  Or, maybe not so bad.  What's the worst that could happen?

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Parallels - Disney+

I watched Parallels so long ago that it feels like I watched it in 2021.  Is that possible?  (No, it debuted in March).  So far on Disney+ I've not encountered many foreign language D+ "originals", and yet Parallels is a French production, but promoted as a D+ original.  Curious.  

Anyway, the show is a 6-episode sci-fi drama that clearly was inspired by Netflix's smash German time travel mind-fuck, Dark. I was expecting, given this being a Disney production starring teenagers, that this would be a stripped-down drama, one with more teen angst in the Young Adult mode, but to my surprise it doesn't hold back from some heavier emotional implications.  A group of four friends head to an old bunker they've turned into a hang out space, only to get caught in the side-effects of a supercollider experiment.  After the experiment, two of the teens are missing, Bilal and Sam.  Sam's troubled younger brother, Victor, and his crush, Romane, are left behind, unable to explain to their families what happened to the others.  Meanwhile Sam finds himself in an alternate reality where everyone else is gone and a cloud of suspicion surrounds him and Bilal shows up, but a 37-year-old man.  What happens after I've basically forgotten at this point, but I recall being impressed with the mystery while at the same time being completely unable to shake the feeling that this was all familiar territory.  It really did have so many shades of Dark that I couldn't help but compare the two.  Dark was an ambitious multi-season epic that required deep investment into the plot, characters and timelines.  Parallels is a much slimmer affair, to the point that its finale, while providing closure, doesn't seem wholly satisfying to what it built up to.  Then again, with only six episodes, most clocking in between 30 and 40 minutes, there's not a lot of runway to really build up to something big.  

If you haven't seen Dark, this is like an entry level version of it, if you want to test the waters to see if you can both handle the timey-wimeyness of it, as well as subtitles.

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The Old Man Season 1 - FX

Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow together again, for the first time?  Without doing a minimum amount of research, it seems like Bridges and Lithgow should have been in a whole string of movies together and that this series was a marked "reunion" of the two.  Kind of like how Heat brought DeNiro and Pachino together for the first time, but it seemed like the two had been acting in films together for years.  Anyway, the Old Man should have been EVENT television, but we're in a serious golden age of TV, an abundance of riches, and as such, this union of two massive acting talents kind of fell under the radar.

The Old Man finds Bridges as an old time operative who has been operating off the radar for a very, very long time.  But, just because he's been carefully working in the shadows doesn't mean that people aren't still looking for him.  When his current guise is compromised, he runs, and winds up sheltering as a border with Amy Brenneman.  The two have a bit of a thing, but when she's threatened by her association with him, he essentially kidnaps her to keep her safe.  This dynamic is the most potent, as well as the most difficult aspect of the series.  Bridges genuinely likes her and is affectionately trying to keep her out of harm's way, but at the same time Brenneman is completely at his mercy in a very much damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don't way.  But, she also proves herself adaptable with her own level of cunning and shrewdness and I do quite love how her story plays out.  Meanwhile, we learn about Bridges' daughter (Alia Shawkat) who is his inside man at the CIA, working directly under Lithgow as his protege, and close family friend.  There's definitely conflicted emotions in all of that that do get explored rather nicely.

And then, this whole time, we're thinking "The Old Man" is Bridges, or possibly both Bridges and Lithgow, but no...they were both working together for a time under The Old Man (Joel Gray) who is both above and beyond the normal pecking order of operations in the world of espionage they exist in.  Add to the mix a hitman and his handler (Gbenga Akinnagbe, Ecko Kellum) who have their orders and their own objectives, and it all swirls into a grand mess of who's-really-in-charge and what's-the-real-threat.  It's a twisty, exciting, gripping series that would maybe have been tighter as a film, but it's never a bad time with either of its two leads on the screen (it keeps them apart for the bulk of the first season, save for a scintillating phone call or two, so that when they do eventually come together it feels like a suitably massive moment).  

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The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Season 1 - Amazon Prime 

I tried reading The Lord of the Rings once.  I got bored very, very quickly.  I've watched Peter Jackson's films a couple times.  I do get bored, frequently, watching those (most of The Two Towers holds my attention, though).  I skipped The Hobbit films, because I knew if I found the LOTR trilogy boring with all the intricate details from Tolkien's books filling out the world, that a trilogy based off one much slimmer book would be dicey viewing.  I was not at all excited for The Rings of Power, if based on Tolkien's works at all, it'd be loosely off the materials collected and expanded upon posthumously.

But, the wife, she likes her fantasy.  And there's the curiosity factor of seeing Bezos put his money where his nerdy heart lives, putting a billion dollars into a season of television like a man for whom money has lost all meaning.  So I watched The Rings of Power and found myself...surprisingly...invested.  Where others, for valid reasons and for toxic ones, have found LOTR:ROP unwatchable, I actually looked forward to that hour every Friday where I would be transported to Middle Earth, watching hobbits and orcs and dwarves and elves explore their religious beliefs, call into question their societal tenets, confront their prejudices, all in the name of quests, quests, quests.  Like the slow sci-fi of Andor, this is slow fantasy, taking its time, exploring its world, the people that live in it, and how they live in it.  How they choose to accept or defy the order of things.  I thought, based on the trailers, that LOTR:ROP would be populated by a cast of not-ready-for-primetime-players, the type of fantasy cast you'd see on the syndicated productions like Xena or Hercules but I was surprised there too.  They may not be big names or recognizable faces, but they are talented, attractive people who buy into the world, and make it all come to life.  And jesus, do they ever look great doing it.  The sets, the costumes, makeup, hair, armor, weapons, decor, all of it is to.the.nines.  It's gorgeous, and the razzle dazzle of an opulent production does go a long long way.  Do I remember a single character's name?  No.  But I can picture the whole season pretty vividly in my mind.  As much as I can get bored by fantasy, I really did like every story in this (but the stuff with the dwarves was my favourite).  Your mileage may vary.

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She-Hulk: Attorney At Law Season 1- Disney+

I really dig She-Hulk as a character. Since John Byrne's meta-adventurous run in the late 1980's with the character, Jen Walters has been mainly positioned as a fun character in the Marvel Universe.  Before Deadpool was addressing his audience in the comics, She-Hulk was breaking the fourth-wall, but not in an imp-ish way that other comedic characters would in comics.  She-Hulk's adventures still mattered, still had stakes, but there was a narrative device, and an injection of Looney Tunes into the proceedings that really made her title stand out.  The 20 years later, the Charles Soule run of She-Hulk, on which the TV show is loosely riffing on, focussed on Jen as a lawer, and on making a workplace sitcom set in a law office and courtrooms, basically a superheroic Ally McBeal, with only a minimal amount of fourth wall breaking.

I was really into the idea of a She-Hulk TV show, especially with Orphan Black's Tatiana Maslany in the lead (she was outstanding in that show, and having heard her on comedy podcast, knew that she could more than handle a sitcom leading role).  But then the trailer came out, the one with the unfinished Shulkie, and the trailer wasn't selling the comedy very well either.  I was nervous.  And that nervousness bled through to watching every episode, week-by-week, and it never let up.  I was not relaxed watching the show the first time around, and I was nitpicking it to death, to the point that I had convinced myself that it was a show that tried too hard and failed.

But, I gave it a second shot, binged it in one sitting, and found myself absolutely delighted almost every moment.  Knowing what was going to happen, knowing who the players were, not anticipating any surprises, taking myself out of MCU-SPECULATION-MODE (which is a horrible place to be sometimes) and just sitting back with the show, it's super-duper fun. It's really not trying too hard.  It successfully negotiates adapting the character, adapting the Soule run, integrating different aspects of the MCU, introducing new aspects to the MCU, playing with the fourth wall, and getting more than a few laughs every episode, while also investing you in the character and her journey in a big-budgeted sitcom kind of way.  It's impressive.  Sure, not every scene with She-Hulk looks perfect.  It's a tough effect to pull off even on a heightened Marvel TV budget, but, once you're used to it, it's mostly good enough for now.  I mean, do I have the hots for the big green lady?  What I think is the biggest contributing factor She-Hulk brings to the MCU is sexuality.  With the exception of Tony Stark's more lecherous tendencies in the early Iron Man movies and a tepid love scene in the Eternals, sex is almost never acknowledged in the MCU, but here Jen is sexually active, and sexually proactive. In perhaps my favourite turn of events, she wheels Matt Murdock (so great to see Charlie Cox again, and playing the character in a lighter capacity) who then is the next morning seen doing the walk of shame barefoot in his Daredevil costume, boots in hand.  My favourite single moment of the series (it makes no logical sense, but it's still brilliantly executed).  It's great fun, with a great cast (love Ginger Gozaga and Josh Segarra, and Patty Guggenheim's Madisynn is the ultimate scene stealer), and lots of epic moments all pointedly fun.  I went from thinking this was maybe not good to now thinking it's maybe the best Disney+ Marvel show.  Can't wait for more, but also can't wait to watch it again.

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Lego Masters Season 3 - Fox

Lego Masters Australia Season 1&2 - Discovery

Lego Masters UK Season 1 - AmazonPrime

I've written about Lego Masters a few times now on the blog, and I'm unabashedly a fan of the show.  The third season of the North American version, hosted by Will Arnett, I was so excited to watch week to week, and I was bursting with Canadian Pride as we had a few very strong teams in competition this year.  What I genuinely like about the show is how, despite being a competition, the competitors clearly begin to bond with each other over time and there's a real sense of comraderie between them, as well as the judges (Lego certified builders Amy and Jamie) who clearly respect the talent as well as the people.   Some of the challenges this year included building life-sized dogs for a dog show, playable mini-golf holes, recreating a Marvel scene, and building a workable water fountain.  After the first four or so teams are eliminated it becomes pretty clear who the top teams are, yet there are still surprises that happen, technical failures that were unpredictable that can sink even the most talented team.  As always, the editing format of the show can be grating.  I HATE that the show opens with a preview of the show, teasing the challenge and which teams might be having trouble with them, rather than just letting the show play out, and I also, direly, detest the cut to commercial when something dramatic is about to happen and the 30 second replay when it comes back from commercial.  It's maddening.  As well, the editing of the timing so that we hear Arnett call out how much time is left, but it's clear when it cuts to different teams and their builds, it's not aligned with the actual time.  I don't appreciate the deception for "dramatic storytelling purposes".

Which is just one of the reasons why Lego Masters Australia has proven to be the superior entry of the Lego Masters franchise.  Lets get this out of the way, the first season of Lego Masters Australia was a bit of a gong show, with some of the participants being way, way down the talent ladder compared to what we'd seen on Lego Masters in North America for 3 seasons. But Season 1 of LMAus also pre-dates Lego Masters in North America by 2 years so it really set the template for how the show should run and I bet at that time the Lego Community was maybe a little dubious about a talent show of Lego building.  The second season of LMAus, though, wound up with three teams in the final that produced a build that could have bested the winners of any of the three seasons of LM in North America, so it was a huge step up for season 2.  

What makes LMAus stand out, though, is its host, comedian Hamish Blake.  Where Will Arnette's on-screen personality is full of fake ego and braggadocio that kind of keeps him at a bit of a distance from the competitors, Hamish is utterly boyish and playful, frequently doing bits with, and around, the competitors.  Blake also does a talking head confessional to the camera (something Arnett doesn't really do) and really brings a hugely comedic aura to the show (it's no wonder he's won awards for his hosting of the show) that is infectious.  The show's format also is different, and took a bit of getting used to, but I like it more.  Rather than 10-12 teams starting off, the show only starts with 8 teams.  They do an initial, non-elimination build to compete for the "golden brick" (which the team can use at a later date for immunity from an elimination challenge), then they do a build for which the winner gets to skip the next elimination build, and then it's only on the third build that a team gets eliminated.  This way we get to see each team produce at least 3 builds before one is eliminated.  It's more focussed on the talent than the competition this way, and I do love it.  Also with the smaller starting roster it lets the teams develop their sense of camaraderie with each other faster, and we as an audience get to know them more easily.  The first season had one team with a super-talented but utterly maddening, ego-centric twerp that pushed around his partner who went maddeningly deep into the show, which fuelled the show when maybe the builds weren't as strong as we're used to.  Season 2 had a lot of surprises, including an underwater build, and designing a brand new Star Wars ship, among others, which really pushed the challengers to pretty amazing heights.  The finale of Season 2 was easily the best of the 3 North American and 2 Australian series.  I'm eagerly awaiting the domestic release of seasons 3 and 4.

Less exciting was Lego Masters UK.  The format of the show is decidedly different, at 4 episodes the first season.  Though I should stipulate that Season 1 predates even the first season of LMAus it's still wild how drastically different the show is.  Starting with a roster of 48 teams, quickly winnowed down to 8, and then eliminating two more in the first episode, it's a dodgier talent pool than the first episode of LMAus.  Like, two teams of kids under 12 made it through to the top 8.  It seemed clear to me that this was an early prototype for the Lego Masters format, and there wasn't much figured out, in terms of how they wanted to present the show, who they wanted to have on the show, and what the target audience was.  It's structured like a tepid British all-ages documentary, with the host narrating what's going on and providing lame puns as transition points.  It borders on painful.  The "brick pit" were kind of majestic places in the North American and Australian versions, here, it's all just Rubbermaid towers...so many drawers really making it hard to find things and build fast.  And the challenges were cute, but super short, with 3 hours, or sometimes no prescribed time limit, leading to mostly pedestrian builds across three episodes.  The final episode provided the two finalists something like ten days to create their builds, which did lead to some pretty massive displays, and they were pretty nice, but I couldn't help but wonder what any of the top three teams from any of the other LM  series would have done with 10 days of building time.  There's a two more seasons of LMUK floating out there (I'm hoping they improve the format but if they didn't it's probably why there's only 3 seasons) and apparently 3 seasons of a Dutch LM series (which looks to be more in the NA/Aus format)

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For All Mankind Season 1 - AppleTV+

As far as streaming services go, AppleTV+ has the hardest time selling me on their wares. I've been hesitant to explore what they're offering, if anything because they don't promote what they offer very prominently.  I think of all their shows the only one I recall seeing a trailer for was The Morning Show which only seemed to be selling the idea of Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carrell, no other indication as to what it was about.  I found Severance (my favourite show of '22) via Adam Scott promoting it on a podcast, and Mythic Quest was trumpeted highly by tv critics during its first season, but not promoted well by Apple.  For All Mankind is something that should have been an easy sell to me and other nerdy based on it being the product of Ronald D. Moore of Battlestar Galactica fame (with Matt Wolpert and Ben Nedivi)...plus, it's sci-fi, in that it presents an alternate history of the space race.  It really starts with the conceit of "what if Russia landed on the moon first?" and takes its cue from there.

The first season rockets through the late-1960s and 1970's, taking a big jump through time and progress every few episodes.  It mixes fictionalized version of real life individuals with wholly new characters fleshing out that the Cold War became a lot more about the Space Race.  Joel Kinneman (Suicide Squad) is the de-facto lead character of the series, playing Ed Stafford, as a fictional Apollo 10 astronaut who orbited the moon, and felt the pull to land, but followed orders instead, costing them the "first man on the moon" status.  Ed and his old guard of astronauts find themselves in a heightened environment, flush with funding and keen to compete to achieve the next great milestone.  From the onset, the idea is that the moon was just the beginning, that Mars is next.  The series has a pretty large cast - astronauts, ground support, administrative, housewives and children.  Shantel VanSanten (The Flash) plays Ed's wife Karen, and at first I judged the role as being a real thankless one, just another stay on the ground, anxiously watching TV cut to as the men do the derring-do, but the role becomes much more that of who's left behind, particularly late in the season when Ed is effectively trapped on the moon base (yep, this season ends with a moon base having been established) and she's having to deal with increasingly difficult situation at home, alone, and make the decision on whether it's good or not for Ed's mental health to know what's happening.  There's also some spotlight roles for female astronauts, with the episode "Nixon's Women" probably my favourite of the series so far, with one wife of an astronaut joining the program (logically, and being pushed through because of her attractiveness, plus the marketability of a husband and wife astronaut crew) and the pleasure of unflappable Molly Cobb (Sonya Walger - Lost) joining the cast full time.  

The first season works so well because of its rapid pace, burning through time and letting the audience keep catching up to them and all the benchmarked changes to the timeline compared to our own.  That tracking of the changes in the realities is probably my favourite part about watching the show, but I also enjoy how grounded and methodical it is, not afraid to just wallow in jargon if it means maintaining the air of authenticity.  It's a good looking show, probably a pretty expensive first season of television.  We've started season 2 which starts with a 10 year time jump, but I found it gets bogged down in petty drama, rather than the exacerbated pace of rocketing through time and teasing out the alternate reality.  We stalled out on it at the half way point but have been encouraged to stick with it for an apparently dynamite season 3.  Will report back.

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The Resort - Showcase 

I was drawn in with Cristin Milioti (Palm Springs) and William Jackson Harper (The Good Place), as they're two very likeable personalities who I was thinking I should be paying more attention to.  Together in one place is a good a starting point as any.  Very quickly, as Emma and Noah, we're introduced to the idea that their 10-ish year marriage is on unstable foundation.  Emma seems particularly detached and Noah can't seem to get through.  The resort they're headed to is on a tropical island, and Noah hopes it's enough of a break from real life that things can be shaken up.  But I don't think what happens was the kind of shake up he had in mind.  During a quad-runner tour of the island Emma has an accident, spraining her wrist and getting banged up...but she also finds and old Motorola Razr flip phone.  She starts to obsess on its origins and, after locating a power supply and replacement battery in town, finds out that it belongs to a college-aged American kid who disappeared from another resort that was destroyed in a storm 15 years earlier.  Emma convinces Noah to let her investigate things before turning the phone over to the police, and it draws them into something much bigger and more confounding then they could have imagined.

The series jumps back and forth in time, between Emma and Noah's often fruitless and certainly amateur investigation, and Sam (Skyler Gisondo) and Violet (Nina Bloomgarden) meet-cute romance that has the spectre of tragedy looming over it.  Emma and Noah's investigation seems to only do enough to provoke people who thought this story long since forgotten, and the show keeps asking the question does it actually spell danger or does it only feel dangerous?  Then, in the mix of it all, is a third storyline about the mysterious, unhinged Alexsander Vasilakis (Ben Sinclair), owner of the doomed resort, who claims to be a man displaced from time, and his memories are leaking out of his ear.  His friend Baltasar (Luis Gerardo Méndez) is the lynchpin of both timelines.

What's quite wonderful about The Resort is how it upends its status quo every episode.  You're never quite where you think you are with the series, and each episode ends in a way that provides you with no clue as to where its going.  It's not a puzzlebox mystery, so there's no frustration with these pivots, just surprise. The tone of the show shifts as well, from dramatic, to comedic, to suspenseful, to serene and back as it weaves its story, that, slight spoiler, does take a metaphysical turn, but also earns what it asks of its audience.  It knows what its showing is hard to comprehend and its characters reflect that.  And along the way, we get a pretty intense dissection of Emma and Noah's life together, and it's quite affecting.  As well, I was very, very pleased that the show concludes, decisively, at the end of its 8 episodes.  It's a mini-series, not a franchise or left with any dangling loose ends.  It's kind of rare that we get such a concrete and satisfying conclusion to a story.

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1899 Season 1 - Netflix

Speaking of Dark and puzzle boxes, the creators of Dark return to netfilx with another compelling puzzle box mystery, this time set on a turn-of-the-century ocean liner, with a multicultural, multi-lingual cast, and the ominous disappearance 4-months earlier of a predecessor ship.   Truth told, I had a lot to say about this series when I watched it and started writing about it over a month ago, but a blogging mishap to my words, and enthusiasm to rewrite those word, away

So, in brief, 1899 is a bit of a marvel resulting in part from Netflix's global outreach. There are no less than 6 languages at play on the ship, and there's nearly no storytelling gymnastics at play to try and get all the characters to speak English.  This is a show from German creative team, so if anything, it seems to jump into German a little more often than I expected.  The opening moments of the film are a dream sequence which triggers the puzzle box into motion, but it's only once our Captain makes the unpopular decision to turn off course to see if an emergency broadcast is coming from the missing sister vessel that the mysteries start to unfurl.

What Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar are so adept at is not just negotiating their puzzle box elements (it's apparent that they learned from Lost's mistakes, and they have the answers to all their mysteries, but also that the mysteries are only important as long as the characters care about them) but in having them service the story and characters, not just fill space with intrigue.  Across 8 episode they blitz through so many of the confounding things they introduce, and at the midway point, they have a massive event that shakes up the cast quite dramatically.  

I was all in on the series right up until the end when we get a reveal that...spoiler...isn't too dissimilar to the ending of the American version of Life on Mars (and that one left a bad taste in my mouth, so it was an unwelcome reminder).  My hope is that, like with Dark, Friese and bo Odar's big reveal in this finale is just another upending of the status quo and our expectations, and that there's an entirely other drama and purpose to come.

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Atlanta Season 4 - FX

Season 3 of Atlanta, produced during the crest of the pandemic and in Europe took an almost detached form from what Atlanta had been before.  It was almost more of an anthology of detached stories than any sort of serialized production.  I mean, Atlanta has been operating in this mode almost from the beginning, but it sort of forgot about its connections between its characters, and certainly it felt set apart from its titular home city.  Season 4, then, returns home for 10 episodes that, at least in the first half, reach for a more comedic tone, while still doubling down on the surrealism and still steeping itself into the topics that seem to be weighing heavily on Donald Glover's exceptionally talented mind.

There's Earn's going to therapy and making decisions about his future in both career and family, Alfred facing both his own mortality and that of his career's (literally buying a farm), Darius' adventures in trying to return a bad gift or take a spa day in a sensory deprivation tank, Van confronting her parenting skills after taking her daughter to a casting call only to have Lottie get trapped in a crazy-time version of Tyler Perry's Atlanta-based studios.  The only one-off episode is a wild modern-style documentary about "the Blackest movie of all time: A Goofy Movie" which is as compelling as it is fake, which is to say completely.

With the exception of the very serene, laid back and nonthreatening "Snipe Hunt", Glover and company reach for greater comedic highs, and even greater absurdity than ever before (and they reached pretty high before), and mostly accomplish it.  I enter every episode of Atlanta with a pit of dread in my stomach, and I need a good 10 minutes with every episode before I know what I'm sort of in for, tone wise.  But at the same time, I've been watching long enough that I know Glover loves a good rug pull.  In the second episode, "The Homeliest Little Horse", the rug pull is one of Atlanta's biggest laughs, but, in typical fashion, one that really makes you think about the implications of it all and make a decision on how much you agree with it.  It's an absolutely fabulous, hilarious, utterly compelling, thought-provoking, frequently challenging show, one that I wish could continue forever, but at the same time one that I know we were lucky to even get 4 seasons of.  Each episode is a mini-movie, often playing with genres, and most are worth coming back to on their own merits, as well as part of the whole.

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Letterkenny Season 11 - Crave

For the past two years, new seasons of Letterkenny have been released on Christmas day, and for the past two years, the wife and I would blitz Letterkenny in its entirety prior to the new season dropping.  I love the show -- I'm a huge fan -- and I do like how connected I am to it as an international success, dripping in Canadiana as it is.  But I have to say, 11 seasons of Letterkenny may be too much in one concentrated dose.  I'm so familiar with the first 7-8 seasons that I know most of the beats (but by no means all the jokes) by heart.  The more recent seasons, 9 and 10, are a little more mysterious, as I've only seen them once or twice prior, and then the new season, bingeing all 6 episodes at once, becomes a bit of an overload.  As my wife and I slip into Letterkenny-isms throughout the month of December -- telling each other to "figger it out" or "pull your finger outta your ass" or "skoden" -- it becomes to much to take in the new things, to properly absorb the new content in any meaningful way, to the point that I start to wonder if the new content isn't maybe not as up-to-snuff (up-to-schneef?) as prior seasons.

Did I laugh at Season 11? Heartily. But, because the latest season is so overpowered by my entrenched familiarity of what came prior, it doesn't feel as good, it doesn't yet feel a part of the whole.  Is it just that? Or is there something, maybe, lacking about an episode that spends its time debating which Old Dutch potato chip flavour is its best (especially when All-Dressed, the most Canadian chip of all, is excluded from the running).  It's kind of an one-note joke that has peaks and valleys within, but it's only elevated by the "what the actual fuck is going on here" questioning of an outside party stepping into the proceedings.  

Prior seasons in the middle would end with a bit of a little emotional cliffhanger, whether it's Wayne getting suckerpunched by another local bruiser, Tanis beckoning Wayne to the barn, or that Marie-Fred moment (or that other Marie-Fred moment). The past two seasons have been missing that little end-note cue to wonder about when the show returns, that little character moment to contemplate the implications of.  This season has a runner of Wayne helping out a local degen who wants to turn over a new leaf, but ends with a very melancholy failure to do so, and it's a kind of heaviness the show's never had before that maybe almost breaks its reality.  It points out a sort of in-world, small-town justice system that calls into question the whole order of things (Stuart telling Wayne about the rumours Jivin' Pete was spreading when he was buying drugs off him makes Stuart complicit in Jivin' Pete's drug addiction, and it's odd that Wayne doesn't do anything about that, more over is seen hanging out with the skids on a regular basis).

I'm probably overthinking it. Someone needs to tell me to pull my finger outta my ass.

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His Dark Materials Season 3 - HBO

My final viewing for '22: the finale of this adaptation of the Philip Pullman His Dark Material trilogy.  It ends a long way away from where it started, and it feels like it's grown up so much, in part because of the bigger break between seasons as a result of the pandemic which means young Lyra (Dafne Keen) and Will (Amir Wilson) have visibly grown out of childhood and into young adults.  It also is much heavier, more head-on in its critique of blindly following religious leaders and treating stories literally. The series has been leading to a literal war between heaven and Earth, but it posits Heaven and Hell as just other dimensions, angels and demons as just other forms of beings unlike our own, but still struggling with the same quandaries we all do.  

As it builds and builds towards an epic confrontation, its a story that's constantly taking a step back to look at its characters and the context of the situation, and how it's shaping them, it's a series that wants us to think of the past as we consider the future, to look at how we've changed as people before we decide that others cannot change.  It's a series that sends the message of live life, be curious, explore, but do good when you can and be mindful of what harm you are capable of.  There's not explicitly an anti-war stance, but it clearly is a story that embraces love and peace as answers far more than fighting and death.

My favourite aspect of the story is the idea of us each having our own death, a spirit so to speak that follows us from our birth, and knows us like no other.  When our time comes, we meet our death, and reflect on life as they move us to the next stage of existence.  That next stage, in Pullman's worlds, can be a number of things, but ultimately it's a return to everything, becomeing one with it all.  Dust.  It's much the same conceit as in the finale of The Good Place and this connection between the two series made me feel all sorts of warm tinglies.

I worried about the third-season yips with HDM, that the series would be hamstrung by declining viewership and tightening budgets, but there was clearly an investment that was made by HBO and they delivered where it mattered most.  The world of Mulefa, and it's elephantine inhabitants really came to life on an impressive scale, and the angelic battle in the sky was stunning in its presentation.  Though I haven't read the books, but I understand the reputation they have now.  

I Saw This!! What I Have Been Watching (Kent Edition) - Another One

 In the quest for the most unruly feature on the blog...

I Saw This (double exclamation point) is our feature wherein Kent(me) or Toasty attempt to write about a bunch of stuff they watched some time ago and meant to write about but just never got around to doing so. But we can't not write cuz that would be bad, very bad.  Rootin' Tootin' Stoopid Pootin bad.

What I Am/Have Been Watching is the admitted state of typically Toast, but in this case, Kent, spending too much time in front of the TV. But what else has the pandemic been about if not toobin? Sure, we got a few breaks from being confined at home, and might have actually gone outside (gasp!) and socialized with (double-gasp!) human beings (faint-dead-away) but we always ended up back on the sofa, flicker in hand, trying to find something to watch amidst the many streaming services pillaging our credit cards every month...and yeah, Kent still has cable.

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I'm going to try something different with this. Since these are all subsequent seasons of things I've already watched/reviewed, I'm going to reread (and link to) my review(s) of previous seasons and see what, if anything, different I have to say about them in comparison,

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What We Do in the Shadows season 3 - FX 

reviews: Movie | Season 1 | Season 2

It may have been COVID TV-viewing fatigue, but I wasn't super jazzed about watching Season 3 of WWDITS.  It was also one of our first regular programs to return as a COVID production, and as a result there was a strange airiness to the show, avoiding crowds and keeping distance.  Or perhaps it was just me being hyperaware that it was a show produced in the COVID years and airing in the COVID years and looking for anything that might signify it was shot in COVID times. F#$@ COVID.

I highly enjoyed every episode, and loved Kristin Schaal (of Flight of the Conchords and Last Man on Earth) as a regular guest star (she should just be added as a series regular, she felt underused).  Nandor had a pretty big storyline this season, impacting everything, and though it was wildly inconsistent and a little confusing (as he seemed to be in love one episode then with a long term love interest in the next) it led to a pretty severe shake-up by the season's end.  Likewise the "Colin Robinson is dying" story was outstanding and ended with a delightfully horrifying reveal in the finale.  I worry about Nadja and Laslo, as they were separated for much of the season which felt atypical for the couple, but, again, plays into where things wind up at the season's end.  As comedy it's consistently hilarious, as a story, it's hilariously inconsistent.  I don't recall as many meme-able bits but maybe I just need to give it a rewatch.  My brain is notoriously bad at retaining clever lines.

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Saved by the Bell Season 2 - W

review: Season 1

SbtB was one of my favourite shows last year, a real respite when it turned up 9 months into the Pause.  It was no less welcome or enjoyable in its second season. Okay, maybe just a smidge less enjoyable.  Where the first season backgrounded its references to the original series, the second season brought jokes and references of OG SbtB right to the forefront.  Members of the original cast were brought to the fore in many of the episodes rather than being more background support.  But, the comedy here is still pretty damn good.  The show's deft ability to tackle race, class, gender and sexuality without ever becoming "a very special episode" and maintaining its jokes-per-second funny is such a gift, and it never leaves behind what the spirit of the old SbtB was (this season's big runner was about Bayside High competing against their chief rivals Valley in a semester-long spirit competition).  The show is so vibrant in its colour tone (wardrobes and sets are so crisp), and it uses its sunny California locale to bring such an overwhelming sense of warmth.

There are shows that shouldn't have long seasons for fear of burning through story and character ideas, and then there are shows like Saved By The Bell, which, operating on the 30 Rock sitcom model, should just be cranking out 25 episode seasons for maximum comedy dosage.  Point being, 10 episodes just doesn't seem like enough each year.

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Letterkenny Season 10 - Crave

reviews: Season 1 | Seasons 2-6 | The Pause rewatch

Speaking of not enough episodes, Letterkenny has shown up, in full, on Christmas day the past two years, which means that the wife and I binge the latest 6-episode season on Christmas evening, and then have to patiently wait another full year for more.  Prior to season 9, it seemed that Letterkenny would release its seasons about twice a year, with a holiday special inbetween.  So there would be about 13 new episodes a year.  That was much more satisfying.

It's like when I deign to make arepas for dinner.  It's pretty exciting, because arepas are yummy, but it takes a lot of time to prepare and grill the arepas and their fillings, and once I finally get to sit down, apply the garlic aoli, I'm famished and devour the thing in seconds, barely tasting it.  That's the new-season-of-Letterkenny experience for me now, so much anticipation and then just a gorging, barely tasting it as it goes down.

The only good thing is the long lead time gives us time to binge the entirety of the series yet again before each season drops.  Well, really, the good thing is a new season of Letterkenny.  And just when I start to think Letterkenny may be jumping the shark, that maybe it's losing a little steam (it seemed to be light on Squirrelly Dan this season), that it's close to repeating itself, it pulls out some brilliance.  One episode in S10 deals with prostate checks and how squeamish guys get about the whole thing, only to have a couple female members of the cast dramatically demonstrate the regular invasiveness of their examinations.  And having the skids square off against the hockey boys yielded ridiculous results, and also one mean dance sequence that is one of my favourite moments on the show.

As well, the show came back for an International Women's Day special in March (their first holiday special since season 7), which was a massive surprise and a raucous delight. 

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Titans Season 3 - Netflix

reviews: Season 1 | Season 2

The first two seasons of Titans seemed to be a show that was trying to find itself.  The first season adjusted mid-flight from being a super-edgy superhero show to hewing somewhat closer to its comic book self.  The second season tried to lean into its comic book history but it tried to do too much in a short period of time, creating uneven results.  The third season was much tighter in terms of the story arc it wanted to tell, but it got lost in the Batman of it all.  Part of that getting lost was intentional, as the team relocates to Gotham and deals heavily with Dick Grayson, Barbara Gordon and Jason Todd's challenging relationship with their mentor, and the pretty unhealthy mindset that Bruce Wayne encouraged in them...basically he was a bad father figure and damaged them as much as anything prior to his "rescuing" them.  The Riddler (Mad Men's resident dick Vincent Kartheiser), despite being imprisoned, manipulates his situation (somewhat impossibly but comic book-y enough) to be the big bad of the season, even as the same character was poised to be the big bad of the next major motion picture (which at one time would have been a huge deal).

What all this Gotham/Bats stuff does is push most of the other Titans to the background.  Even when characters do get a spotlight, it's so outside of what the show is otherwise dealing with it doesn't all feel of a whole, properly integrated.  The best episode of the season, just as with last season, is almost a complete detour from the main plot, as a handful of characters take a trip through the afterlife.  Given the show's budget limitations, this all is sold by intonation, and it works pretty well.  It is a compelling season, but I think the fan desire (or at least my desire) is still something much bigger in scale, more fantastical/supernatural/superheroic/cosmic-like. 

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How To With John Wilson Season 2 - HBO

review: Season 1

How To... is sort of a Koyaanisqatsi-like series with a quasi-comedic narrative put upon it.  A lot of random imagery used to help exemplify the thin narrative construct of, say, "How to appreciate wine" or "How to be spontaneous."  There's an almost meditative quality to it, and it's just sheer chill watching, rather peaceful, a little absurd, and quite fascinating.  The first season felt almost personal and intimate, and ended with the pandemic just taking form.  This season starts with the pandemic in full swing, but also weaving in and out of the premature moments of "returning to normal" as it intermixes much of Wilson's historical footage.   But the second season feels a little less intimate, a little less personal, a little less singular.  Wilson's stamp is still all over this, but it does feel like there's a bit more of a machine at work behind the scenes, and it seems more of a production than a labor of love (or at least the end result of some form of compulsion).  Still a compelling delight regardless.

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Search Party Season 5 - HBO

review: Seasons 1-4

Those first four seasons of Search Party were a challenging binge, the darkest of dark comedy.  The characters seemed to be circling the drain, and pulling everyone around them, the viewer included, down with them.  It was frequently inspired, often hilarious, but also bracing and confrontational.  Season 5, like each season before it, upended any expectations about what it should be and where it could possibly go as it leaned hard into farce for its final season.  Not wanting to depart with a sour taste, but also not being untrue to how the show has operated for four seasons, it leaned into this season's ridiculous premise that Dori, having gained fame as a murderer/kidnapping victim, started a cult, but a cult tied heavily into modern technology and social media.

Half a year later, we've been deluged with these stories of start-ups that exploded then imploded with oddball figures at the helm promising the world but only seemingly delivering the world to themselves.  Search Party's showrunners were clearly picking up on these stories (which were either long form articles or podcasts) and their place in the zeitgeist, and incorporating it perfectly into their series.  And having seen glimpses of Inventing Anna or WeCrashed or The Dropout I think Dori as a character perfectly fits alongside with those shitheels.  And there's also Goldblum.

The series ends big, and bold, but with muted millennial intensity, undercutting severity with selfishness, and the gang faces their consequences with a shrug given the chaotic nature of what happens, numb to the problems of the world.  I expected nothing less.  Pretty fun.

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A.P. Bio Season 4 - Showcase

reviews: Season 2 

What I started to notice in Season 3 (but didn't see fit to write about) was that A.P. Bio was verrrry slowly moving through the AP Bio class' final school year.  Each seasons was maybe 2 months of class time with season 3 having a winter break towards the end of the season.  I think the plan was for maybe 5 or 6 seasons to round out the full school year.  I thought the show was great, but once I picked up on this, I delighted in it even more.  

There's not a tight continuity to A.P. Bio but it does build up its characters and picks up and drops threads as needed.  It never really needs to carry any threads and it's often very subtle in how it advances things.  It's yet another show (in a good way) that has a sprawling cast of characters in its world, it's main cast of teachers and students and it's peripheral cast of other teachers and school support staff who crop up on occasion.  I love these types of shows that have this whole world around them and see fit to bring back smaller roles over and over again for maybe one scene every other episode.  

Seasons 1 & 2 aired on NBC, seasons 3 & 4 were scuttled over to NBC's streaming service Peacock, where the show started experimenting with its storytelling format, which gave me feelings of Community if not quite as adventurous or savvy.  I appreaciated its playing with structure and sitcom formulae and happy that it got the four seasons it did, but I wish it could have one more just to wrap all the little dangling threads, and to see the kids graduate.  4 seasons and a movie?

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Resident Alien Season 2 - CTV SciFi

review: none

I'm not sure why I didn't write about Resident Alien Season 1 (Toasty did a little) but, as my comment to that Toastypost said, I lurrrved it.  

Watching season 2, I have to clarify that statement.  What I lurrrve is Alan Tudyk's performance primarily. We've had aliens in TV sitcoms many times in the past Mork from Ork, the Solomons from 3rd Rock From The Sun, Balky Bartokamus, Borat (whether we're talking about aliens from outer space or aliens from often fictional European countries, the effect is quite the same), and the gist of comedy is always about how unfamiliar they are of the societal norms, and how the character twists what little they do understand of them.  Typically this comedy stems from the character's ignorance, whereas with Resident Alien and Tudyk's Harry Van der Spiegel, largely comes from a place of not giving a shit and feeling eminently superior in spite of his ignorance.

It's so entertaining that it's almost to the point that no story arc, no character journeys really matter, I'm mostly just watching for the sheer joy of Tudyk's amazingly weird physical performance and belly-laugh inducing line readings.  The thing is, the whole cast of characters are pretty good, and quite likeable, except maybe the town mayor and his wife, whose domestic relationship storylines tend to feel like time filler (at least until they blow up in the final episode of season 2).  They're really only necessary because their 10-year-old son, Max, is the only one who can see through Harry's disguise and is Harry's chief adversary in a ludicrously juvenile rivalry. Season 2 starts feeling like spinning wheels, but by the second half of its 8-episodes, it starts to pull together a number of exciting threads before it abruptly ends on a cliffhanger.  The comic book the series originates from is much more tranquil and not a comedy, and actually more of a small-town mystery series.  The first season flirted with mystery, and the second season starts to toy with Harry as amateur gumshoe again (nods to Lenny Briscoe)

The show's seamless integration of Native American culture is not just token asides, but actually an integral part of the show, an important part of Asta as our second lead, and just as important to Harry's developing attachment to Earth.  It's through his exposure to the Ute traditions that he starts exploring what it means to be human (even though he initially detested the idea of being even remotely human).  It's a largely silly show (Tudyk's buddy Nathan Fillion is a recurring guest star this season, voicing an octopus) and its story pacing is quite uneven, but each episode is a breezy, entertaining journey that's really hard to dislike.  I don't know that there's a lot more mileage left in its tank, but I hope a third season can bring its story a satisfying sense of closure.

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Star Trek: Picard Season 2 - CTV SciFi

review: Season 1

Yeesh.  You did it to me again, Picard, you sucked me in, and then you just sucked.  You start off so strong and then just flail and strike at some of the most absurd story beats, leaning into some of the least enticing elements of the story you're presenting.

It doesn't help that between the first and second season Patrick Stewart seems to have aged 10 years and now looks every bit the 81-year-old man he is.  His face sags so deeply that it's often hard to read his emoting.  He's got that bit of tremble to his hands and jaw that no longer scream commanding officer, but instead shout of frailty.  There's a shakiness to his voice that only goes away when he's being angry and forceful, and there's not a lot of call for that.  I love Patrick Stewart and almost every moment he's on screen in this second season I fear for his safety... like at any turn he's going to snap his femur or fall over and smack his head on the table.

They develop a love interest for Picard in Orla Brady's Laris, who at 61 is 20 years Stewart's junior, but is so stunningly drop-dead gorgeous that it feels like there's a 40-year span between them.  Love is love, and it only kinda works because she's supposed to be a Romulan and their romantic customs are vastly different than Earth ones.  You'd break him in half Laris.

The show brings back the Borg, and Q, and Guinan (all of which I was good with) in a story that at first seems scintillating, but then winds up in quasi-time travel/altered reality bullshit that feels lazy and cheap, or maybe cheap and lazy.  Reality has been drastically changed, and yet the cast remains largely the same, which just serves to remind me that I'm watching another season of a TV show, and not a new mini-series starring Picard.

I binged the first 5 episodes when I didn't think I would watch it at all.  I was looking for something to fall asleep to.  But that opening episode was so full of promise that I watched and watched until I was all caught up, only to feel less than enthused when episode 6 dropped later in the week.  That episode, with its cheesy, tedious 60's Star Trekkiness has put me off watching the rest in the same way the first season finale put me off wanting to watch a second season.  I'll probably finish it, but I'm not super pumped about it.

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Russian Doll Season 2
review: Season 1

It's been 3 years so I had to give Season 1 a rewatch before I headed into the much-anticipated Season 2.  It's of course been on the list for a "T&K Go Loopty Loo" (coming soon once Toasty gives it a rewatch) even though Toasty and I both written lengthy reviews about it.  What can I say though is I thought that first season might perhaps be the best time loop story we've ever gotten, and rewatching it sort of confirmed that fact.  It's amazing.

I had thought incorrectly that Season 1 ended on a cliffhanger, but rather I just misunderstood it.  There's closure in season 1 to that arc, so after the rewatch I really wasn't certain what season 2 would be.  I didn't watch any trailers, I wanted to be surprised. (Toasty nearly spoiled it in a text message but, in a fit of good timing, I only read it shortly after watching the first episode).

I was surprised.  I was kind of expecting another time loop, not Quantum Leap-y time travel, and not a magic train that whisks Nadia on her 40th birthday back in time into the bodies of her mother in NYC in 1982 and grandmother in Budapest 1942.  The journey for Nadia (and Alan who has his own little side-journey into his grandmother's body in East Berlin circa 1962) is about recognising that having regrets or wishes that the past was different would mean you are not the person you are today, for good or ill, and you have to contend with that. There's truly no way to change it, so acceptance is really the only path forward.  

If anything disappoints me about this second season it's that it short shrifts Alan's story, quite dramatically, to the point that it almost has no real weight on the overall season.  Nadia's story is so dominant this season in a way that doesn't integrate much at all with Alan's, unlike the first season where the twos journey was interwoven.

I muse in that forthcoming Loopty Loo that the only thing that could tear down Russian Doll's status as the GOAT of time loops is weaker subsequent seasons.  But since the show is not embarking on further time loops, even a weaker second season (and it is weaker) doesn't sway my feelings of the first.  Where the first season was both so darkly comic and delightful, but also contemplative and exploratory, this second season feels a little flat on all fronts... Natasha Lyonne is still surly yet charming and she carries the emotional weight required, but there's not the comedic highs, and the surprises are much more muted.  I thought the finale was clever, beautiful and strong, but it didn't leave the same sense of demanding "what's next" that the first season did.  I'm still curious what's cooking for the third and final season.