More TV! MORE TV!!

[garote]

(A note on perspective: I'm a "gen-X"-aged person from the Bay Area, raised on a diet of Monty Python, Stephen King, and Ducktales. I assume your own tastes will vary.)

The Peripheral (2022)

I really dug this show. It started out telling a series of personal stories and never strayed too far from that, even as the sci-fi concepts got convoluted. Reviewers complained that it abandoned the personal in favor of the ideas but I disagree. Chloë Grace Moretz carried the central role easily and always found a way to bring some nuance to scenes and a role that wouldn't have had enough detail to stand by itself.

I was really hoping for a second season that might unravel some of the extremely hasty plotting in the last episode, but that's not happening. Still very worth watching, and I hope it boosts Moretz' career.

Seven out of ten funky VR goggles up.

The Last Of Us (2023)

I played about half of the game this was based on, skipping ahead across save points that my girlfriend had left on the console. It was intense though sometimes far too self-serious for the contrived drama it was trying to deliver. It was also guilty of railroading the player into making bad decisions for the sake of the plot, which I found extremely annoying.

The transition to a miniseries was done very smartly, fleshing out the world and characters in ways that a single-character first-person perspective didn't allow. Most welcome and surprising was an episode right in the middle of the run that just dropped the main characters completely and told a different story set in the same world. That was a high point. Unfortunately, it returns to the plot of the game, and crashes into one of those contrived false-choice setups that got me so annoyed as a player.

I am now going to utterly spoil the last episode, in order to complain about it, so if you want to watch this show without foreknowledge, skip this list of exasperated questions:

• Why the hell wouldn't they let Joel talk to her?
• Why the hell would they want to put her under for surgery only a few hours after taking her in?
• Why would they lie to her about the consequences?
• Why would they need to remove her entire brain in order to extract a sample of tissue, which could have been done with a large freaking needle?
• How did Joel manage to slaughter his way through what looked like ten heavily armed and trained men who apparently did not even coordinate over the radio or know the chokepoints of the area they were supposed to defend?
• Why wouldn't they throw another smoke grenade at him, since the first one knocked him right the hell down for plot-essential reasons, even though bullet wounds and blunt trauma couldn't do that all throughout the rest of the series?
• How is Joel upright and so active after being cold-cocked in the back of the head with a rifle? That's a serious injury. You don't just get conveniently put to sleep from something like that. You stand a chance of your brain swelling up in your skull from internal bruising and putting you in a coma and/or giving you lifelong brain damage.
• Why doesn't he tell Ellie the truth about what happened?
• Why doesn't he take her out of the hospital, then give her a real choice about coming back? Is he truly convinced she'd want to be vivisected? If the answer is yes, he's a monster. If the answer is no, he's an idiot. There's no good outcome for him. There isn't even an outcome that makes sense.
• This whole 45 minutes was stupid, and an insult to the characters and the audience. The series would be better if they just chopped it off the end and threw it away. I'm serious.

That mid-season standalone episode is lovely but zombie stuff is pretty played out. Six out of ten disembodied zombie arms up.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2023)

A throwback animation that wears its influences on its sleeve. Those influences being Akira and Ghost In The Shell mainly, each about 30 years old, so I suppose it's well past time for them to be resurrected in a form that assumes no familiarity with the originals, crossing the line from homage into the less classy terrain of rip-off. The developers of the series claim it's based on a recently released game (Cyberpunk 2077) which is in turn based on a vintage tabletop role-playing series (Cyberpunk 2020, from many years ago), so it makes sense to assume that any vintage elements come from the RPG, directly or indirectly. Nevertheless, what makes it onto the screen is so unnecessarily close to the plot, structure, and visual style of Akira and Ghost In the Shell that there isn't much new to see here.

The plot is "military corp experimenting on punk kids" of Akira wrapped in the "moody mercenary cyber gunfight" setting of Ghost In The Shell, stretched out over ten episodes. It delivers buttloads of action, getting more unreal and high-stakes with each round, and goes exactly where you'd expect, with no surprises or diversions along the way. Anyone familiar with the source material knows what that means: Our main character descends into body horror madness and almost everyone dies, and those that survive don't get a happy ending.

The action and the diverse character design kept me interested all the way through, even when the characters got boring. With four and a half hours to run around this world I was hoping for a deeper emotional dive, but I think the directors weren't confident enough to go there without losing their audience. Every character has the same motivation: Get rich or die trying. I guess they were pitching this for teenagers and had low expectations.

It would have been nice to explore deeper ideas about what it means to be human -- something the cyberpunk genre can do very well. The venerable Ghost In The Shell, usually remembered as an action movie, spends at least half its time in trippy interludes where the characters discuss their unease with who and what they are, and I miss that.

Six robotic fists up out of ten. Worth seeing, but definitely not essential.

The History Of The World Part II (2023)

This is a sequel to a movie, presented as eight episodes of television. So you're going from a fast-moving hour and a half, to four hours of padded comedy with lots of ad-libbing.

That's not as bad as it sounds. The comedians are all clearly enjoying themselves, and together they've managed to keep the feeling of middlebrow satire Brooks was aiming for in the original, but with the politics and sex scrupulously updated to account for the 30+ years of cultural evolution since the original film.

It wasn't enough to hold my attention directly, but it made for excellent casual viewing while I organized files or did housework. Plus, Wanda Sykes is freaking hilarious in anything.

Marvel's What If..? (2021)

I know too much about Marvel stuff, considering that superheroes were never really my thing. The only comic books I devoured as a teenager were ElfQuest and Johnny The Homicidal Maniac. The first is a self-serious high fantasy adventure starring a bunch of wolf-riding elves, and the second is a hyper-ironic cultural takedown of all things gothic and broody. I loved both. But superheroes were always somewhere in the boring middle for me, even the supposedly dark reinterpretations of them in the 90's. So how the hell did I end up watching so much Marvel crap?

I don't know. It feels like a fever dream at this point. I paid good money to see the same story told ten different ways. I could have gotten more story from ten episodes of Ducktales. What was I thinking?

Well, at least that giant pile of lore in my brain comes in handy for understanding what the heck is going on in this playful "What If" spinoff series. I chomped through it in two sittings, and somewhat out of order. Most of the time it managed to swerve away from the knee-jerk "what if the good guy is bad and the bad guy is good" premise, and there is a vague connection between most of the episodes to tie things together in the end. If you like Marvel crap, this series will shovel you some more. If you're not sure, you need to start somewhere else at least.

Five flappy capes out of ten.

The Boys Presents: Diabolical (2022)

The Boys is a guilty pleasure for me. I think it may have jumped the shark midway through season 3 and now I may be done with it, but it's still high on my list for being consistently either interesting or weird. "Diabolical" is a spinoff animated anthology, inviting various artists and directors to play around with the characters or invent their own in the same universe.

Sadly this was almost entirely forgettable for me. They led with the best episode and met that bar with the third episode, and I assume everyone else got paid pretty well and had a good time, but most of the stories were situation comedy setups with magical violence layered thickly on top. And that's on-brand for the series, I suppose, but I wanted more.

Half the pleasure in watching superheroes behaving badly is the feeling of hedonistic abandon you get as they indulge some stupid or dangerous urge that you feel in your daily life, without facing the usual consequences ... and then the other half of the pleasure is in watching them face hideous unforeseen consequences anyway, proving that you're better off being who you are. These stories try to deliver on that in various ways, and to my jaded eye, mostly fail.

Well, except for that first one. I love me a good Looney Tunes homage.

Four out of ten exploding piles of animated entrails up.

Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters (2023)

I came to this series looking for fancy creature designs. Like the titular organization, I wanted to get close to some giant atomic-powered monsters in strange locations and see what they could do. So, every time the writers stopped cold in the middle of an adventure to shovel me some trite character backstory, I got annoyed. By episode 4 I was skipping entire scenes of this junk so I could get back to the adventure and monsters.

I suppose I'm just in the wrong quadrant of the notorious four-quadrant viewer demographic (young male, young female, adult male, adult female) or something. Or perhaps I've wandered off that plane along some third axis. But I just cannot follow the emotional state of these characters. When they argue, which they do frequently and for inane reasons, every other line of dialogue just doesn't connect to what they appeared to be thinking a few seconds before.

It's as if the actors are working from a script that just says [ THEY ARGUE ] at regular intervals, so the director shoots 10 minutes of improv dialogue and hands it to the editor, who reduces it to 30 seconds of hash. Then there's an almost audible clunking noise as they pick up the plot where they left off. I wish there actually was a noise, or better yet, a symbol in the corner of the screen like those old film reel markers, so I could just drag the time slider to the end of [ THEY ARGUE ] and get back to the monster chasing.

The monster chasing is cool, though.

Also, when they get to San Francisco and start showing scenes around the city, I was constantly snickering at thoughts like, "That curb should be crammed full of cars. That coffee shop has far too much parking lot. That house has a deck in front of it; what? Dang, that bike needs a much better lock..." But hey, I guess they did their best, filming in Canada.

I mean, atomic-powered monsters? I'll suspend my disbelief for that. Half a street of open parking in San Francisco? PREPOSTEROUS!!

I wish I could recommend this series. I was expecting something else. Four giant monster footprints out of ten.

New seasons!

Foundation, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Good Omens, and Love Death And Robots all have new seasons out this year. All are worth watching. Get your butt in a seat, you have at least 30 hours of good media to watch.

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

Interesting how none of these interested me. What do you think of "The Office"? I'm totally enchanted.

[garote]

The Office relies a whole lot on "cringe comedy", where characters spend a lot of time making each other uncomfortable. I watched a few episodes but it didn't hook me.

[juan_gandhi]

At the very beginning I was impressed by the office realism. I saw so much of this shit in the companies in this country. Then I got totally pissed off by the behavior of the office slaves. THen I gradually got into the atmosphere.