Still alive. I haven’t been posting lately, or been around much online, mainly due to being busy with real life issues, issues which have crowded out most reading. But I have managed to watch a little TV.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, starts off with a man in a goofy getup walking into a diner, terrifying the customers by claiming he has a bomb, that he’s from the future, and there to recruit some of them for a mission to save the world. In the early stages, you’re going to wonder if you’re just watching something about a crazy person. The only thing I’ll reveal about what follows is that he’s not crazy. Other than that, this is a movie best experienced cold. The ride gets increasingly wild as the film progresses. I enjoyed it.
Per Aspera Ad Astra takes place on an interstellar spaceship taking years to reach a destination. The crew is in suspended animation living in dream fantasies managed by the ship’s computer system. But when the ship comes under threat, it becomes necessary for the lone awake crew member to wake some of the others. However, things have gone wrong, and waking key crew members requires entering their dreams.
I think the film was going for the wacky antics of Everything Everywhere All At Once, but we’ve all seen Inception and so see the antics coming long beforehand. It turns out that the surprise of the antics is just as important as the antics themselves, at least for me. Not that the movie is terrible. It was entertaining enough, but didn’t deliver the same emotional punches as those other films.
Silo season 3 continues the story of characters in a post apocalyptic underground silo discovering the nature of their world and how to survive in it. Juliette has made it back to her own silo but has lost her memory. She and her allies struggle against the intelligence trying to control them. That struggle is shown with flashback interludes to the 21st century revealing the origin of the silos. The answer to many mysteries have been revealed, but there will be one more season for the climatic battle and final reveals. I’ve enjoyed this series immensely and definitely recommend checking it out if you haven’t already.
The new Ghost in the Shell show is basically a fresh adaptation of the story from the original manga series. I can’t say I found it compelling, maybe because I’ve seen the story repeatedly, and I found some of the style choices distasteful, namely periodically infantilizing the characters to show their emotions. If you’re completely unfamiliar with the franchise, this show might be worth checking out, although personally, I think the 1995 anime movie remains a better option.
Currently, both the Doctor Who and Star Trek franchises are in the crapper, I think deservedly so. The recent writers on both shows don’t seem to take their premise seriously anymore, except for tying in to past versions of the show. Both have gone off the silly end repeatedly in recent seasons. In the case of Strange New Worlds, the show seems preoccupied with tying things into the original series. That does lead to some cool moments, but the many excuses to have James Kirk on the ship have become pretty lame.
And the stories of the individual episodes often seem more like attempts at comedy skits than serious storytelling. I don’t mind the occasional humorous episode, but when watching the last couple seasons, my patience gave out multiple times while enduring the 1960s TV show episode, the everyone is an obnoxious Vulcan episode, the haunted ship episode, the everyone’s stoned episode, the black and white noir episode, the everyone is a muppet episode, and the soap opera episode.
Reportedly there will be one more season of Strange New Worlds, although it will be abbreviated. Hopefully that means less throwaway silliness. I’d love to see the stories live up to the excellent casting and production values.
The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin is a pretty fun show if you’re familiar with Arthurian legends. It has lots of little easter eggs throughout to heighten anticipation. But there have been critical reviews from people not up on the mythology. The show begins generations before Arthur, and even before Merlin, with Merlin’s parents. Then it jumps 75 years to an adult world-weary Merlin, filling in his backstory with flashbacks. The only thing that lessens the experience, at least for me, is the anachronism of Atlantis as an explanation for the fay folk, a story of a lost island nation invented by Plato several centuries before the events shown in the show. (At a minimum, they could have renamed it like Tolkien did.)
But I enjoyed it enough that I’m hoping for additional seasons. Reportedly the show is based on a book series, so the material is there.
Lately episodes of Babylon 5 have been getting posted to YouTube and I’ve been rewatching key episodes. I actually have the whole series on DVD, but these are high definition and I think have been remastered. They certainly look better than I recall from the DVDs. Watching them is reminding me of just how good the show actually is. Certainly it’s far from perfect and not everything has aged well, but it still stands head and shoulders above most sci-fi TV.
When I was in my comic book phase in the late 1970s and early 80s, there was only one Green Lantern: Hal Jordan, a superhero who got his abilities from a powerful ring, a piece of technology from the Green Lantern Corp, an intergalactic police force. I knew there had been another Green Lantern character in the Golden Age (1940s), but Jordan was the one when I was reading. Apparently since then there have been others, and Jordan himself underwent a number of transitions.
None of which I was aware of when I started watching Lanterns. In this show, Jordan is an older, grizzled, and somewhat bitter character, who has been forced by the Lantern corp to take on an apprentice, John Stewart, who he knows the corp sees as his eventual replacement. So he treats Stewart like shit. Stewart is an exceptional character, who in the beginning accepts Jordan’s treatment stoically, but eventually there is conflict.
Most of the story takes place in a small town in Nebraska named Rushville, where some murders have taken place that Jordan is convinced involve extraterrestrials. The people in the town don’t want them there, but there turns out to be a lot going on under the covers.
Like most DC Universe shows, it’s darker and grittier than its Marvel counterparts, but I mostly enjoyed it.
That’s what I’ve been watching. Have you seen any of them? If so, what did you think? Watched anything else interesting lately?
