Peeks, Pokes, and Pointers!

It's Sunday and I'm on break from the real world. Time for mini-reviews!

(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.)

Constellation (2024)

I'm a sucker for a good present-day or near-future space drama. I like to watch brave people messing with screwy hardware while they live messy lives, and that was what I expected from this show. And I got that, but I also got something else: A tense psychodrama that digs into themes of mental illness and objective versus subjective reality, twisted around a central mystery that unwinds very artfully as the episodes go.

As an adult with a "mad scientist" type of memory that seems very accurate right up until I stumble into an alarming pit, I can relate quite well to the characters. And I know that the premise, scientifically speaking, is pure hogwash, but I decided I just didn't care because the show sticks to its own rules, even when things get very complicated. For example, there are back-to-back scenes deep into the show that appear to be happening to the same character, except a scar on their forehead keeps appearing and then vanishing. In any other show that would be an embarrassing continuity error. Here it's a deliberate clue. They do very little spoon-feeding, and I love it. Either you're paying attention or you're lost. They don't pop up a character every five minutes who plays dumb and has the plot explained to them in simple terms by some other character, like you get in, oh, just about everything Star Trek and Marvel from the last 20 years.

Some nitpicking: The characters spend a little too much time wandering around between cabins. You'll know what I mean when you get there. Also, I found it surprising that in the last episode, we don't get a full explanation of what's been going on, to match up with what we pieced together. It's a bit like we're at the end of a mystery novel, and now we expect the famous detective to use their little gray cells and explain exactly how the murder really happened. It validates and congratulates us. But that doesn't happen here.

I honestly wonder if, deep in the guts of this production, they prepared two edits of the last episode: One that answered everything and tied it all off, and one that gave no final explanation and left a few threads loose. And by week six or seven of watching the online reviews, they realized the show was going to be a hit, and so they cued up the second version, leaving us hanging for another season.

I want that to be the case, because it's very clever, and because it would neatly excuse the showrunners for making a plot that leaps about so acrobatically and then, at the last moment, fails to stick the landing.

Now we have to wait, what, two years for a second season? I don't think I have the patience for that, honestly. The puzzle has been assembled. What's left for a second season but sweeping the pieces back into the box?

Seven spooky space helmets up out of ten.

One Piece (Live Action Version) (2023)

Netflix has been very uneven with live adaptations of beloved anime, like Cowboy Bebop, Death Note, Bleach, etc. One Piece punches above its weight.

The creators of this show must have learned from past mistakes. They preserve the comedy, the thematic digressions, and even the action, but most importantly, they preserve the sense of absurdity that firmly plants One Piece in its own space. In this world, seagulls wear hats and deliver the mail in little bags. Giant snails act as telephones. Marine captains wear hoodies with mouse ears. A "fish man" is a regular man who walks around on land in regular clothes, but has fins on his triceps, a sawtooth nose, and teeth that regrow in seconds. Because... why? Because it's freakin' absurd, that's why. And best of all, no one, anywhere, questions or comments on any of this.

The thesis is right there in your face from the beginning: This isn't science fiction. You can't even make a start at understanding how this universe works. You're gonna have to take it as allegory or something. So with that established, what really matters here? The characters. The world is insane but their struggles are very genuine. And yeah, most of it is soap-opera level family stuff about estranged fathers and sisters, and even saying it's soap-opera level is too strong because there's zero romance, but everyone is so dang earnest and heartfelt that you can't help getting invested. Rooting against One Piece would be like rooting against puppies.

A while back, I recommended an anime called "That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime". I said: "It's a show where the protagonist resolves conflict through compromise, mercy, alliances, and generally being friendly. Things work out, people turn away from violence, and life gets better. And perhaps it's because I viewed it in the depths of the pandemic, but, I found that refreshing."

That applies here too. Seven straw hats up out of ten.

Scavengers Reign (2023)

In this series, the main character is a weird planet full of weird wildlife. If that sounds like your cup of tea, then you will find this one absolutely delicious. If not, move on.

Non-spoiler alert: This is absolutely my cup of tea. I've come across a bunch of stories over my long journey in science fiction that serve this particular brew, and I always love it. The examples the spring to mind right now are Piers Anthony's "Of Man And Manta" (1968), Arthur C. Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama" (1973), and Stephen Baxter's "Proxima" (2013). The common thread is: You're separated from your own environment by an unimaginable gulf of space, dropped into an alien ecosystem operating on its own strange rules, and if you pay attention, you can see how it works. The common experience is: Everything around you evokes a sense of newness and wonder, and possibly danger, along with a sense of deep isolation because you know you are probably the only human to ever see these things, and may never understand them.

This series doesn't occupy this niche by accident. You can tell because for large chunks of time, the episodes just abandon the human characters completely and hang around watching the wildlife do odd things. Ideally, these things would be weird but would stand up to the close scrutiny of evolutionary biologists. That is, they would have plausible answers to the question "how did these creatures and behaviors evolve?" And, well, I can't say this planet bears really close scrutiny, but it bears some, and that's good enough for me to stick with it. Through the first half I was utterly hooked. Yeah, who cares if the characters are a bit stilted and the "villain" is one of those "let's make this guy the worst in every possible way" writing exercises? This show is the opposite of One Piece: I'm not here for the characters, I'm here for the world.

Also, another recommendation: If you like teasing out the weird and possibly broken rules of alien worlds, you gotta check out Aeon Flux, from back in the day.

Eight out of ten wavy alien doodads up.

Star Wars: Andor (2022)

Definitely the best of the Star Wars series, and I think that's for one important reason: The main character is not a magical space wizard or a super-badass warrior monk, he's a regular person stuck in the brutal gears of a totalitarian machine. He and most of the people around him split their time between scraping by on a working-class living and quietly hating the empire.

This provides a lot of pathos, and opportunity for fancy speeches about the need for rebellion. There are a lot. In general, that's good because the Star Wars universe tends to use its central idea mostly as decoration, even though it's right there in the name: This is war. War is what happens when systems of governance become too exploitative, at home or abroad. And this series actually examines how that would look, and work, from the inside.

In fact the show does too good of a job. Most of the way through it I was suddenly struck by a similarity that had never occurred to me before. The North Korean government produced a cartoon show many years ago called Squirrel and Hedgehog. The entire point of the show was to indoctrinate young viewers into the idea that the North Korean government's use of endless war preparation and endless persecution was normal and necessary, because everyone else in the world was out to get them, and was also far more evil and hateful towards their citizens than North Korea could ever be. So it's episode after episode of spies, and open warfare, and sabotage, and suffering, and constant threat of invasion, and the only way forward for a so-called peaceful society is to work as hard as you could every day making weapons and building walls, and you should never, ever trust anyone beyond them.

What's chilling to me is, this endorsement of total war as a way of life is also the core of Star Wars. Rebellion is cool and exciting, and if you're not participating, you're a sucker (Lando Calrissian), a scoundrel (Han Solo), an idiot (Boss Nass), cannon fodder (The Ewoks), a feckless politician (the galactic senate) or a member of the pampered and ignorant middle class (the entire planet of Alderan, soon obliterated). The only way to redeem yourself is to get sucked into the war.

Needless to say this does not sit well, and by the end, when it's clear that every character is on a course for destruction or suffering because they have given their entire lives to the cause (and made multiple speeches about it), some fatigue sets in. It doesn't help the momentum when, halfway through the series, the heroes strike a triumphant blow for the rebellion and all the narrative steam suddenly whooshes out of the show. I walked away from it for weeks and almost didn't come back.

It sounds like I'm not endorsing this show. But I am. It will just put you in a strange headspace. Perhaps season 2 will get a chance to play around a little, but I doubt it. That's not why Andor is here.

Six little notebooks full of revolutionary polemics up out of ten.

Star Wars: Ahsoka (2023)

This is a weirdly paced show. The action - space battles and swordfights - moves along well, but when it's time for characters to develop, it slows down to a crawl. That would be fine if the actors were consistently able to externalize the conflicts they're working through in each scene, but often they can't deliver, and we're left just staring at the face of someone while they glitch out trying to remember their next line or why they're in the room.

Most of the problem is Ahsoka herself. Rosario Dawson plays her as a weathered and weary freedom fighter who has nothing in her life except her cause, and should have retired long ago. It feels like she's sick of being herself. And that's certainly a valid take on a character that has been through so much violence and been betrayed so thoroughly. It's a believable place for her to end up. But it's also ... well ... not very fun or entertaining. Ahsoka the character is a lead weight in every scene. And that's a real problem for a Star Wars show.

It's easy to mock the Disney crop of Star Wars media. I've done it myself, by pointing out how incredibly constrained their sandbox is: If a pre-teen boy would find it scary, confusing, or icky, it doesn't exist. Or to put it another, more on-the-nose way: Disney Star Wars is Snow White with rockets and lasers. If you want moral ambiguity, real tragedy, or kissing with tongues, you're out of luck. But even within this tiny sandbox, there is still plenty of room for jokes, pratfalls, musical interludes, swashbuckling, and light-hearted banter, which the original films delivered at a pleasing rate. The writers for Ahsoka must have taken on some kind of purity challenge, because they shoveled those things out of the sandbox as well, leaving just the action, the cool costumes, and the visual effects. Which are quite good, but... Well, Star Wars is already the Saturday breakfast cereal of the sci-fi world, and this box has most of the marshmallows picked out. You'll still eat it, staring at the art while you chew mechanically, but afterwards you'll wonder why you brought it home.

Five out of ten spooky space witch thumbs up.

Severance (2022)

The people who curate the Apple TV media brand have really embraced sci-fi, and that doesn't surprise me because the company is loaded with computer nerds. Perhaps they determine what to produce by taking internal surveys, and always get back "Hey do some sci-fi! Great, now do more!"

This show turned out to be much more sci-fi than I expected. Not by way of space lasers and aliens, but in the classical sense of exploring the consequences of a technology. It's also hard to describe what the show is about without spoiling at least some part of the structured reveal that makes it so fun to watch.

I can say this: It's not action-oriented. There are no explosions or fancy creature effects, and no one takes a rocket to space. But if you like psychological thrillers and like it when stories compel you to revisit earlier scenes because they're constantly getting recontextualized, this show is for you. It rewards attention. At the end of each episode you want to pause and pick through what you've just seen. I dig that.

The show isn't perfect. The first season doesn't resolve much, despite multiple opportunities, which is frustrating. Also, a major theme of the show is the extent to which we allow corporations to manipulate our bodies and minds in the pursuit of a wage, and as the writers explore it they trek onto some really shaky ground. It's not that you can't believe a corporation would be sneaky enough to do a thing, it's that you can't figure out why a corporation would bother doing a thing because there doesn't seem to be any profit to it. "Because it's evil and wrong" is not a real motive.

Still, these are minor faults in a great potboiler of a show. Now's a good time to watch it, since a new season is approaching and you won't find the delayed resolution of the first one quite so frustrating.

8 spooky computer screens full of numbers up.

Black Mirror (Series 6) (2023)

Be warned. This is less of a review and more like a post-watch rant, even more tailored to my point of view than usual. Unlike the above reviews, I go episode by episode, and there are a few spoilers in this section.

Episode 1: Joan Is Awful

The first 15 minutes are really rough going, because it's not just "Joan" that's awful, it's every character with more than a few lines that's awful. Joan is selfish, callous, and dangerously non-confrontational. Her ex-boyfriend is a pushy sleazebag with no empathy. Her current boyfriend has outrageous trust issues. (Demanding to see her phone? Instantly believing the content of a television show over her words? Demanding to know what she said to her therapist?) Middle-aged adults making teenager-level mistakes feels disappointingly easy.

Buried in the plot revelations most of the way through the episode is an explanation of why all these characters are exaggerated versions of crappy people, but that does nothing to make the first half bearable. Guess I'm just too old for this shit.

And then there's the actress who plays her in the meta-show, who says and does things that barely pass as human to move the plot along. But hey, it's all about the concept, right? So we ignore the meshing gears, and try to embrace the idea, as the episode loudly shifts from a psychodrama into a farce at the halfway point.

Unfortunately, it's ground that Black Mirror has tread at least four times before, as I recall: Company X has invented technology Y that aggravates the worst aspects of society Z. Company X doesn't care about the social harm, technology Y is inescapably addictive, and society Z is gob-smackingly complacent, all of which puts our main character through a wringer, and they either fight the system and smash it, or (more likely) fight the system and lose dreadfully.

In this case, Joan very literally smashes the system, which somehow puts a permanent end to the central problem and also provides the impetus to reverse not only the trajectory of her life, but her entire personality as well. It's nice to see Black Mirror attempting to buck tradition by giving their protagonist and plot an upbeat ending, and stories about the collapse of society into paranoia and barbarism are a bit unpalatable to a 2023 audience, for obvious reasons... But Charlie Brooker leaned a bit too hard in the "good vibes" direction and the payoff feels unearned, and adds another layer of fakeness to the whole affair.

Episode 5: Demon 79

Very lovely set direction, and with coloring to match the fashions of the time. The time period is not arbitrary here. The constrained life and social circle of the main character is a bit overdone, but there's a point to it: What follows next could only be chosen by a person with no other options.

The ending is a bit conceptually muddled and as the credits rolled I was asking myself, "What's the theme here? What's the argument being made?" It doesn't hold together enough.

Also I watched this one right after "Joan Is Awful" and for the second time the episode was hard to stick with because so much of the characters and setting was miserabilist. I like a sci-fi concept with interesting thoughts foremost, and good laughs second. To feel aggravated at the behavior of characters and want them punished is not on that list.

Episode 4: Mazey Day

Same dang thing as the last two episodes, at first. Horrible people acting horrible, and perhaps it's supposed to be edgy and get your pulse up, but to me it's cartoonish and annoying. I know we need broad strokes to define characters with economy in a short story format, but this is like painting with a pressure washer.

You know those big budget films with fancy actors playing "computer hackers", where nobody involved in the production, from writers to directors on down, has ever used a computer beyond checking email and playing a few rounds of solitaire? This is that. Except in this case it's not computers they don't understand, it's people behaving badly. The writer sat down and thought, "I want to make tension, so I'm going to make this character the designated asshole, and think up asshole things for them to say and do, so the other characters can get hurt and angry." The problem is, "he's just an asshole" is not a believable motivation. Maybe the writer is too inexperienced, or too lazy, or just too timidly socialized to create and write a character that can show a relatable motivation for doing or saying an ugly thing.

At least it was short. I spent the first two thirds of it wondering why such a bonehead story even deserved to be filmed, then the last third going, "okay so this is a genre throwback, and has shifted gears into that, and dang I wish it had just shifted gears after the first two minutes because now it's way more enjoyable." Is every single episode this season going to be this way? You spend the first third watching people be assholes and wondering what the point is, then there's a twist? Perhaps that's the Black Mirror formula now.

Episode 2: Loch Henry

In this case, we get "people behaving like assholes" for just a little bit in the first 20 minutes. It wasn't ham-fisted either, so I'm rolling with it. But we do still get that same question, for the first two thirds of the episode: Why does this story even deserve to be told?

Then of course there's the twist. Thankfully, the story is carried beyond the immediate consequences, and we get some additional detail to provide food for thought. I'd say that of all the episodes I've seen so far, this one is the most gracefully told, with the most believable characters. It's also not trying to deliver a high-concept premise or a "this world is not our own" rug pull, and perhaps that's not a coincidence.

Episode 3: Beyond The Sea

I usually like things set on space stations, so I saved this one for last after glancing at a few frames of it. What a waste.

The episode is well over an hour long, but at the 15 minute mark I suddenly knew exactly how the story would play out, beat-by-beat. Suspicious, I skipped forward almost an entire hour, and yep, there's the scene where it all unravels and confirms it. I'm not even going to bother summarizing.

That's it for now!

Writing that last set of mini-reviews was kinda fun, so I'm doing some more!

(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.)

Guillermo Del Toro's Cabinet Of Curiosities (2022)

A horror anthology with a lot of range. All of these stories kept me watching, all of them had excellent visual effects, and some of them were emotionally cathartic as well. Watch them in any order, though I suggest you save “The Murmuring” for last, as it makes a nice emotional coda.

The Falcon and The Winter Soldier (2021)

To make money with your streaming service you need to load it up with enough exclusive junk that subscribers will be unable to consume it all in less than a few months. After that crucial window, your victims - er, customers - will tend to relax into the idea of being automatically billed for something they may or may not use.

Disney’s easiest path was to take characters in the Marvel and Star Wars universes, and create a bloated miniseries for whichever ones could be played by actors that didn’t charge too much for their time. Hence, this series, and many like it.

I watched it all the way through, and then it fell entirely out of my head. I remember some weightless superhero fight scenes, some easy moralizing about how the armed forces exploits disenfranchised people, a stab at blind patriotism and the glorification of war, and a few minor twists. The central conflict is over whether Sam Wilson - a Black man - is willing to assume the role of Captain America, which was offered to him by the previous Captain America. Does the whole idea of America suck so much that he’s got to turn it down? Or should he assume the role to try and remake that idea?

The most I can promise is that you’ll have a nice time watching it. These days that’s enough to raise a show above the streaming quality baseline.

Midnight Mass (2021)

Another scary series helmed by Mike Flanagan? Yes please! I had high hopes going into this, and came away with my hopes just a little bit dashed. As the viewer, you quickly get way ahead of all the characters in understanding what's going on, so you spend a lot of time waiting for each of them to have their big "a ha!" moment and do something dramatic, while various characters get grand monologues to fill out the runtime of the series. I want to say that was deliberate on Mike's part, since the main twist is generally not one you can conceal from a modern horror audience so you might as well just ignore it and talk about other things ... but the waiting here is sometimes exhausting. I won't give away the twist just in case you've never seen a horror movie, but it's no spoiler to say that Midnight Mass eviscerates old-time religion, and the way it preys on the disenfranchised and desperate, in a way that's been done countless times before. Nothing new there. Still, the tragic atmosphere, some of the conversations, and the smart camera work make the trip worthwhile overall.

Wandavision (2021)

All you need to know going in is that the title character Wanda ... Actually, wait, you don't even need to know that, and it may in fact be better if you don't. So feel free to wander into (see what I did there) this miniseries cold, even though it's part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and that generally means you need to know an encyclopedia's worth of characters and backstory to make sense of what you're seeing. You don't here. The main gimmick of the show is pretty daring, and it will keep you hooked until the larger arc of the plot transcends it. There are holes but you won't mind them. Plenty of zippy special effects and amusing parody moments. Worth seeing.

Mrs America (2020)

A fictionalized biography of a handful of big names from the Women's Rights movement, structured like a relay race where the plot hands off to a new character each episode. Phyllis Schlafly, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and more are represented here and it's thrilling to watch them maneuver and debate, and challenge the sexual politics that were absolutely dominant at the time and that still hold power in most of the country today. My favorite part of this show is the way the characters do not present a fully united front, making space between them to explore the different and even conflicting ideals of the movement. Very much worth seeing.

Good Omens (2019)

A series based on a collaboration between two beloved novelists, with a great comedic cast. You won’t find any new ideas to chew on - "angels and demons as bureaucrats" is a pretty old one, really - but you won’t mind since it’s the relationships and the absurd details that will keep you watching. I enjoyed season 1 and I hear there’s a season 2 on the way, but I’m a bit skeptical because the book was fully covered in the first season so the writers will be flying blind.

Lost In Space (2018)

This show has generated three seasons and wrapped itself up, so I’m pretty late reviewing it. If you’re run out of The Expanse and are perhaps looking for something a little more kid-friendly and lighter, this is a good choice. Parker Posey is a highlight in it, though she has a pretty thankless role as the only truly conflicted villain. The writers leaned on her character a bit too much to create tension, stealing time and energy away from the sci-if elements, and after a while it feels like they’re playing for time because they don’t know how to answer the questions they set up earlier in the show. So it’s a little bit like that show “Lost” ... but, you know ... ”In Space.”

That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime (2018)

If you googled this title, you're now asking: What the heck is an anime show pitched at little kids doing on your list of "worth seeing" television? Two reasons: It's likely you haven't heard of it, and it covers a lot of territory, so you can watch it and then skip almost everything else in its category.

That category is "portal story" -- so named because there are countless anime shows, going back at least 40 years, whose central premise is "ordinary person stumbles into a portal to another world, and must survive and learn life lessons there." Classic examples include "Escaflowne","El Hazard", and of course "Spirited Away." (Not an idea original to anime of course, with much older examples in Japanese literature.) Soon we will be blessed with the wackiest "portal story" yet: An anime adaptation of the novel series "Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon". That one is not on my list.

If all this is old news to you, then skip this show, because you're too familiar with the tropes to find them weird or entertaining enough. On the other hand, if your familiarity with anime stops at the films of Hayao Miyazaki, go ahead and start up season 1, though you may chafe at some of the more repressed and regressive parts of Japanese popular culture on display in later episodes. I'm willing to bet you'll like it for the same reason I did: It's a show where the protagonist resolves conflict through compromise, mercy, alliances, and generally being friendly. Things work out, people turn away from violence, and life gets better. And perhaps it's because I viewed it in the depths of the pandemic, but, I found that refreshing.

Fun fact: In May 2021 this series was added to the list of anime titles given a limited ban by the Russian government because it depicts reincarnation, apparently a taboo subject given the influence of the church. The Russian media landscape is about 2/3 digital piracy, though, so the ban has no real effect.

The Knick (2014)

The core of this show is an exploration of the early days of surgery as a legitimate medical practice. If you think that sounds weird and dull and a bit gross, you're right except that it's not dull. In addition to doctors inventing new instruments and arguing about technique you get a lot of contextualizing drama that explores the sexual and racial tensions of the time, as well as excellent period detail and scarily good special effects during the many surgical scenes.

And like any good show about the development of a science, things often go wrong and the characters have to scramble against unfolding disasters large and small, making for plenty of blood, and grimacing, and doctor's arms shoved up inside the guts of some unfortunate patient while they mutter things like "don't you dare die!". I should pick this up again. I've almost finished season 1, and I like what it's doing.

-;-;-

And now, some stuff I saw and didn't like, explained a bit:

Archive 81 (2022)

Many years ago there was a movie called the Blair Witch Project, which spawned a sequel that almost no one saw. The original film presented a long video recording and claimed it was an accurate record of real events, and the sequel tried to top the original by exploring the idea of video recordings that directly contradicted the memories of the people featured in them. Which do you believe? Your own memory, or the apparent objective truth in the recording, showing you doing something else? Perhaps some supernatural force is corrupting one or both?

The idea was cool, but the sequel had other problems that made it kind of suck. It's the same deal with Archive 81: It's a "found footage" situation with a supernatural element, it takes a few stabs at the unreliable narrator thing, ... and it has problems that make it kind of suck. It moves way too slow, and it never digs into the ideas it presents. After three or four episodes this feels deliberate: Whenever the two protagonists ask serious questions or try to pry under the lid of what's going on, the script derails them with inane dramatic conflict or a contrived emergency. The writers must have been confident that they could dribble out answers for half a dozen seasons, but instead the show was canceled after one, and it's obvious why. I watched the whole thing and I regret it.

The Haunting Of Bly Manor (2020)

It would have been great if Mike Flanagan came back for the follow-up to The Haunting Of Hill House, investing in the idea of an anthology telling long-form stories about haunted places every couple of years. But the deal went sideways, and he handed the project almost entirely over to other directors. The result is seriously underwhelming. Stretched out over too many episodes, not as thematically focused, and eventually over-explained. Do this instead: Watch episode 8 by itself, which tells the story of the central ghost with a massive out-of-context flashback. Then ditch all the other episodes. You could follow that up with the 1961 film "The Innocents" for a double dose of creepy, and cover all the plot points of Bly Manor at the same time. And you'd have six hours to spare!

Another Life (2019) and The 'Mars' National Geographic Series (2016)

Some science fiction shows create dramatic stakes by having highly professional people do outrageously stupid things. Like, here's three people, specially selected for a mission to save the entire damn planet, and they all know how important it is to communicate clearly and be on the same page and cooperate. But then, the first one has sex with the other two, and the other two get jealous, so one of them decides to withhold vital information that causes the third to be horribly injured and the whole mission is suddenly in jeopardy and everyone has to scramble.

That's not a direct example from Another Life or this Mars series, but it's the kind of thing that happens over and over in both, and it's exasperating. I can't be all 'Wow, we're on Mars, look at this cool landscape and nifty survival gear' because the main characters are too busy double-crossing each other, keeping secrets, ignoring really obvious safety protocols, and so-on. At least the Mars drama is intercut with real scientists talking earnestly about contemporary issues. The Another Life show throws modern science in the ditch. I can't recommend either.

1. I can follow my first impulse, and call my housemates dorks for watching dorks on TV, when they could be out playing street hockey or something. They'd be angry, I'd be angry, and our living situation would become tense and combative.
2. I can follow my second impulse, and seethe about what a lurid pathetic device I think the television is, which would only be half true in my heart -- but I would keep my mouth shut about it, and seethe internally, in order to maintain the harmony of the household.
3. I could forget about it, and the habits of my housemates, entirely, and just get back to my notes. Perhaps I could request they change the channel, or turn on some music of my own.