Dorohedoro and other TV notes

Posting has been a little light lately. A lot going on in real life. But I have managed to sneak in some TV time in the last few months.

I read the book Project Hail Mary several years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. I’m a bit late in watching the movie, but I caught it when it was up for streaming. The adaptation is pretty faithful, omitting a lot of the technical details, which was to be expected, but the overall story is retained.

Alien organisms begin consuming the sun’s energy, threatening all life on Earth. The energy of these organisms: astrophages, is harnessed for an interstellar mission to the only star in the neighborhood not showing signs of dimming from astrophage infestation. However, things go wrong and Ryland Grace awakens to find himself the only one on the mission left alive. The trailers spoil an early plot reveal, that he encounters an alien on the same mission and has to work together with them to find the answer that will save both their planets.

The production values in the film are top notch. I enjoyed it. My only real beef is I found the soundtrack jarring with all the contemporary music. But I recognize I’m thoroughly in the minority.

The second season of Daredevil Born Again doesn’t appear to be getting a lot of attention. Maybe people are just too tired of being reminded about corruption in politics. I sympathize, yet I still found myself enjoying this show. The story is a continuation of the situation in season one where the Kingpin was elected mayor of New York City and proceeds to rule with an ever tightening iron fist.

Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin, knows that Matt Murdock is Daredevil. The beginning of this season finds Murdock in hiding and fighting an insurgent campaign against the mayor. I was a little worried the show would just continue the situation into future seasons, but there are major plot twists and things change. It’s fair to say that by the end of the season, both Daredevil and the Kingpin find themselves in very different places.

There are some things about the show I’m not wild about. The biggest one is Fisk’s ability to evade accountability, even when he’s personally killed numerous people with a crowd of witnesses, starts to become almost a farce. But it’s hard to argue the show doesn’t have an emotional punch.

NieR:Automata Ver1.1a is reportedly based on a video game. As usual, I have no knowledge of the game. But I was drawn to the show due to an interesting premise. Earth has been overrun by alien machine life. Humans have retreated to the moon, but left an army of androids to find the alien machines. Or at least that’s the story in the beginning. All is not as it seems.

While this show has its moments, I found the storytelling clumsy, often having major reveals in narrative information dumps at the beginning an episode, rather than showing it with story events. It also gets progressively darker as the episodes continue, but with an ending that didn’t feel earned. That and the design of the machine life seems conspicuously retro, but not in a way that turns out to be meaningful. Overall, it’s a very weird show. It was entertaining enough to relieve boredom, but your mileage may vary.

The title character of Clevatess is one of the four demon kings that rule the four corners of a continent. Humans perceive that the demon kings are hemming them in, preventing them from exploring lands beyond. A kingdom sends a group of heroes to take out Clevatess. Clevatess easily kills them all, then in revenge destroys their kingdom.

On his way out of the ruins, he is convinced by an impassioned plea from a dying woman to take a baby into his care. He does so to learn more about humanity in order to decide whether to wipe them out. Realizing he’s not equipped to care for a human infant, he resurrects one of the heroes he killed, Alicia Glenfall, and enslaves her to help take care of the baby while conducting his investigation. Of course, it turns out that the baby isn’t just any baby, but the heir to the destroyed kingdom.

Season one of this show was pretty entertaining, and there’s reportedly a second season coming out this summer. Nothing earth shattering, but a show with some good character development and emotional punches.

Dorohedoro takes place in what appears to be two worlds. The first is with humans, who live a city called the Hole, one ruined by magical waste, and plagued by sorcerers who come in to practice their magic on the humans. The second is a sorcerer world, populated by people with varying degrees of magical capabilities.

Caiman is a man with a lizard head. He cannot remember how we got this way, but knows it had to have been from a sorcerer practicing on him. Together with his friend Nakaido, he hunts down sorcerers and then puts their head in his mouth. In Caiman’s throat is a man who declares whether the person currently in his mouth is the one who put a spell on Caiman. Caiman doesn’t know who the man is or how he got there. Usually after the man declares that the sorcerer is not the one, Caiman kills them, having a profound hatred of sorcerers. His friend Nakaido is an accomplished fighter. She also owns a restaurant and makes a lot of gyoza, which Caiman loves eating.

The sorcerer world is ruled by a crime boss named En. When En finds out that Caiman is killing sorcerers, he sends his fixers, Shin and Noi, to find and take him out. Caiman has a red cross around his eyes, which leads En to think he’s affiliated with his enemies, a gang known as the Cross-Eyes. Shin and Noi are aided by two low ranking sorcerers, Fujita and Ebisu, both of which have reasons to want Caiman dead.

There’s an ever increasing cast of characters, and the story widens from there. It’s a hard show to describe in a way that does it justice. I’ll just say that it’s seriously entertaining and worth checking out, at least if you don’t mind a lot of animated gore, often wrapped in irony and gallows humor.

Season one came out several years ago, and I had long given up on seeing any additional seasons. But, after six years, the second season just finished its run on Netflix. Hopefully we won’t have to wait that long for the third season.

Finally, after bouncing off it a few years ago, I’m watching For All Mankind again. I’m currently at the end of the second season. The show still spends far more time on domestic soap opera than I care for, something that prevents me from binging through them, but the season finales take place in space and are pretty good. I’ll probably have more to say when I’m fully caught up.

That’s what I’ve been watching. Have you seen any of them? Or watched anything else interesting lately?