Category Archives: Television

5 Quick Thoughts

 

1) My current Work in Progress novel is rapidly reaching the completion for the first draft. I am currently at 97 thousand words and the story is likely to land between 101 and 106 thousand, then onto the revisions.

2) Resident Alien the SciFi show on Syfy has been pretty entertaining. Quirky characters, fun premise, and a fantastic performance from Alan Tudyk as the extraterrestrial marooned on Earth and masquerading as a doctor is amazing.

3) A deep concern for all my friends and everyone in the massive state of Texas.

4) I get my second dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Monday and I urge everyone to get vaccinated as soon as they are able.

5) Ted Cruz once again displays that not only does have zero concern for the well-being of anyone not in a position to help him but that his intellectual capabilities are hamstrung by his selfish desires and wants. A competent villain would have used the crisis the forge a facade of ability and caring to propel them to greater political power but Cruz is incompetent as he is cruel and spineless.

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The Unused Gun

The Unused Gun

I am on twitter but not gifted with prose that is pithy or witty my tweets die lonely deaths in the vastness of the internet. That’s fine. I read and share a number of great tweets and threads so I get value from it.

Yesterday in response to C.C. Finlay’s tweet about Game of Thrones and how the ending was so botched it made him indifferent to re-watching the series I answered with a couple of tweets one of which actually got engagement- shocking.

In writing there is the concept of Chekov’s Gun, it had nothing to do with the fiery is miseducated officer of the Enterprise but rather the Russian playwright who advised that if there is a gun on the mantle in first act it must be fired by the third.

In Game of Thrones a great deal of narrative time and energy was consumed having young Arya Stark but one of the faceless men, assassins able to take on the appearance of others in order to complete their missions. The audience followed Arya through trials, tribulations, and near death as she acquired these skills. This is the gun on the mantel.

And yet at the end of the series this mystical ability played no part in the resolving of any major plot element. yes, it allowed Arya to get revenge on people and Houses that had wronged and betrayed her family but in the central plotlines of ‘Who will Rule Westeros?’ or ‘How will the Threat from the North Be overcome?’ the years training and leaning this talent proved worthless.

In their mad rush to complete the series the show runners trampled one of the most quoted and most valued pieces of writing advice and the gun stayed on the mantel.

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Streaming Review: The Dig

 

The Dig is a dramatization of the discovery of a 6th century burial ship on an English estate by a self-trained archaeologist, Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) and the estates owner the widow Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan.) The movie details their struggles with acceptance, resistance from the accredited community, and deteriorating health all as England the world plunge into the cataclysmic horror of the Second World War.

This is a quiet, sedate, drama without anyone pulling a weapon or even raising their voice and it still crackled with tension as the characters faces trials and tribulations. It is a perfect example of that uniquely British style of drama that is motivated by class and manners, where the stakes are defines by expectations and the cost of defying them. In years past The Dig would have played to great success on the silver screen but not only due to the pandemic but also changing audience patterns niche channels and streaming services are now the home for this sort of dramatic fare. The truth of the matter is that fewer and fewer people are willing to pay more than twenty dollars a piece for non-spectacle cinema. That is not a slight on spectacle films but rather an acceptance that audiences have changed.

The performances in The Dig are superb. Fiennes adopts a Suffolk accent that is simply charming, Mulligan radiates sympathy a widowed wife facing not only the challenge of raising a son alone with also while dealing with a terrible condition all without ever devolving into maudlin pits of self-pity. The supporting cast is equally talented including Lilly James as a young archaeologist faced with sexism from academia and the horror that she has married the wrong man.

Cinematographer Mike Eley captures haunting and lovely images of the English country giving the fog a ghostly and timeless luminosity that feels as though it has passed through the centuries with the buried burial site.

Screenwriter Moira Buffini’s script shows a deft competence and subtilty that trusts the audience to understand the situation and the characters’ inner lives and motivations without needlessly wordy exposition.

Under the helm of Director Simon Stone all of these elements come together for a moving portrait of people and an age that has now passed.

The Dig is streaming on Netflix.

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WandaVision’s Critical Questions

 

We are now five episodes and on the eve of the sixth into Marvel Studios’ television project WandaVision and in my mind there a few essential mysterious questions propelling the plot. Naturally to even pose the questions is a bit of a spoiler so consider this lede your warning.

In No particular Order.

1) Who is Agnes? Other recurring and important residents of Westview NJ have been identified but on the big board Agnes still has no real-world identification. This coupled with her knowledge and acceptance of Wanda’s powers along with her ‘coincidental’ arrival at key plot points indicates she is a principally important piece of the puzzle.

2) Who or What are Wanda’s Children” It’s been established Wanda or the ‘Hex’ doesn’t created matter but rearranges it and the twins are real but like Agnes without real counterparts. Connecting question; Why are they immune to Wanda’s abilities?

3) What is the purpose of the broadcast’s commercials? In the four commercials all present elements key to Wanda’s backstory before the series. Stark Industries whose weapons killed her parents, Strucker who led the experiment that enhanced her and her twin brother, Hydra the organization that Struker served, and Lagos the site of her mishap that resulted in the death of Wakandans and helped initiate the Sokovian Accords regulating super powered individuals.

4) When ‘Norm’ temporarily freed of the Hex’s influence begs Vision to stop ‘her’ who is ‘her?’ A casual interpretation would be Wanda but the using only a pronoun is a classic way to mask the actual identity.

5) What was SWORD doing with Vision’s corpse? In episode five security records show Wanda stealing Vision’s corpse from a SWORD facility but it was clear that the corpse was not merely in storage but being subjecting to study and or tests. In the comics SWORD stands for Sentient World Observation Response Division but in the Cinematic Universe World has been replaced with Weapon and I can think of only three such ‘items’ in the MCU, AIDA from season 4 of Agents of Shield, Ultron from Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Vision. Of that list all have been destroyed but one has been in some matter returned to functionality, Vision.

6) Why is SWORD Director Hayward so intent of presenting Wanda as a terrorist and willing to move to lethal force so quickly?

So, these are the questions I think are essential elements to the final resolution of the series and the answers will determine if the story works or fails.

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Late to the Game: Star Trek Discovery

 

Though the series is in its third season it was only just this week that I started watching Star Trek: Discovery.

My affiliation with Star Trek goes all the way back to the series’ original run in the mid to late 1960s, though as a child my understanding of the episodes at that time was quite spotty. By the mid 70s with syndication I became quite familiar with the series and a lifelong fan. To this day the words Star Trek always conjure the 60s television show before all other images.

I enjoyed The Next Generation seasons 3 thru 5 finding the first two a little dry and the having lost interest later as the stories became to fantastical and too often resolved by hand waving rather than character motivations. Deep Space Nine was amusing but not compelling to me. I switched off Voyager by the third episode and bounced of Enterprise’s pilot, so the announcement of a new series did not exactly excite me. With the added hurdle it required subscribing to yet another pay streaming service I simply never watched Star Trek: Discovery.

A subscription deal by way of one of my credit card companies along with the promise of a much larger library of Paramount films induced me to finally try the service and now I have watched the first three episode of Discovery.

I’m enjoying it.

The stories so far are much more character based with flawed and imperfect people propelling the plot by their motivations, mistakes, and misapprehensions rather than relying on ‘It’s science-fiction so we can do anything!’ plotting.

Don’t get me wrong, the science of the show is still far from rigorous, but the same can be said of the original series. I like it when an SF property works hard to get their science right but one can be entertained by compelling characters without the edge of hard SF.

I recognize that the series is at odds with what many consider cannon for the Federation Universe but again the original show, produced during the heyday of episodic television where every episode stood alone, never bent knee to the gods of continuity. So much so that modern younger fans watching the original episodes conclude that General Order 24 in A Taste of Armageddon  must be a bluff rather than that the beloved United Federation of Planets actually has a general order for the destruction of a civilization. Old Trek and new trek have never been fully compatible.

So, recognizing those points, I like the show and it’s take on the characters. I enjoy the concept of a central human character who was raised on Vulcan and whose identity is conflicted by being biological human of culturally Vulcan. It’s possible that the first three episodes have misled me and if that is the case there are other programs to occupy my time but for now I am a fan and it has become part of my unwind ritual before bedtime.

Star Trek: Discovery currently streams on CBS All Access soon to be rebranded as Paramount +.

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New Nordic Noir: The Bridge

 

Okay, it is not ‘new’ as the television series has 4 seasons released on home media but it is ‘new’ to me so I am sticking with the post’s title.

The Bridge is a Swedish/Danish co-production centered on investigations that bridge the nations of Sweden and Denmark. Its protagonist is Saga Noren a Swedish homicide investigator. Saga is brilliant but socially awkward and many viewers feel, though it has not been confirmed, that her character exist along the Autism spectrum.

The first season opens with the lights on the bridge between the Swedish City of Malmo and the Danish capitol of Copenhagen going out and in the intervening darkness, an unknown person leaves the corpse of a murdered woman on the bridge with half in Swedish jurisdiction and half in the Danish.

Murder mysteries tend to fall into two major camps, one centered on realistic portrayals of murders and investigators grounded in ruthless reality and the other focused on hyper-competent detectives facing villains of extraordinary brilliance and skill. The Bridge belongs to the latter category. While Saga’s partners and associates are not presented as bumbling like Holmes’ Lestrade often is portrayed, she exists on a different level of skill and talent. Likewise, the murderer of season one possesses a keen brilliance and has made detailed plans for nearly every contingency years ahead of their plot. If you go into The Bridgelooking for gritty realism, while the story and themes are grounds in societal ills, the execution is less concerned with realism than twist and reveals in the plot.

Sadly, The Bridge is not currently streaming anywhere available to the USA. My sweetie-wife who wanted to see the series after reading about it purchased season 1-4 on the UK Blu-ray release and we have been watching it that way.

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My Favorite Season: Agents of Shield

 

I’m old enough to remember when having a favorite season of a television program would have been quite strange. Before the advent of long form story telling season may have been good or bad but that rarely became favorites.

I watched all seven seasons of ABC’s Agents of SHIELD(henceforth known as AoS) during its original broadcast run and now as an unwinding before bed I am re-watching them in order from Netflix. There is no doubt in my mind, Season 4 is my favorite of the seven.

Split between two storylines, the front half centered on the Ghost Rider with the second half focused on rogue Life Model Decoys (LMDs) and the virtual world of the ‘framework’ the two halves are united by the ancient, magical, and corrupting book The Darkhold.

The Ghost Rider is fun, told well, and takes a different spin on the character than the original source but without violating the spirit of the Ghost Rider. The twist revealing the eventual ‘big bad’ was a well-played but for me the season really exploded with the ‘Framework’, the twists and turns of the artificial Intelligence ADIA and the sheer fun of watching actors and characters we had known for three and half season suddenly get to play vastly different colors and personalities.

While Mallory Jansen has been brought in during season four to play ADIA she was hands down the MVP for playing a wide range of characters during the season. She played ADIA, the LMB and rogue artificial intelligence with an evil and yet tragic motivation, Agnes the artistic human that ADIA was modeled upon, Madame Hydra, the supreme leader of Hydra in the virtual world of the Framework, and various shadings of all of these characters from the flat affectation of ADIA when she was little more than a robot to Agnes a frightened woman facing her own mortality.

Continuing storylines can make it difficult to jump into a series these days if you haven’t watched from the start but I do think season four of AoS can be enjoyed without having the watch the previous three, though of course it works much better if you have.

 

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First Thoughts on WandaVision

 

I’m a little late to the game but here are my first impressions of the Disney + new MCU series WandaVision.

‘It’s okay.’

Admittedly this is a nine-episode storyline and trying to judge it from the first one or two is unfair but that’s all we have so far. I have been an MCU fan from the first Iron Man feature film though I was never a collector of comics themselves so things like ‘Is this an adaptation of The House of M storyline go right over my head. However, as a fan I have thoroughly enjoyed the MCU and think overall it has been a spectacular success.

The first episode of WandaVision didn’t really strike me as a solid entry. They did a very good job recreating a classic late-50s sitcom but it suffered from the ‘it’s all a dream’ trope. We know what is happening isn’t reality, and to be fair the show never expects you to accept it as reality but rather part of the mystery, so the ‘impress the boss or lose your job’ stakes are meaningless filler. The first episode doesn’t give us enough stakes or even hints of stakes outside of the illusionary sitcom to create meaningful tension.

The second episode with more unmistakable intrusions by other realities and with an ending that questions who is pulling the strings does a much better job of creating the tension that the first episode lacked and is probably the reason the pair were dropped together with the rest of the series being released one the week-by-week format favored by the streaming service. Though it was nice seeing one of my Buffy the Vampire Slayer favorites, Emma Caufield now credited as Emma Caufield Ford, back on my screen even if the role is likely to remain quite small.

I will stick with WandaVision as I intrigued by the plot but at this time I have not been wooed by the series.

 

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First Review of 2021: Wonder Woman 84

First Review of 2021: Wonder Woman 84

It is said that every movie is made three times, first when it is written as a script, second when it is photographed, and third when it is edited. In principle the stages allow for revisions the bring the final film closed to the ideal that had propelled the project but often diverging voices, power struggles, and a lack of focus allows the stages to muddy the waters and create chaos instead of coherence. This appears the be the case with Wonder Woman 84.

Except for a prolog set in the indeterminate time when Diana was a child, and really this sequence would have been better and easier to suspend disbelief for had they portrayed her as a young teen instead, the film takes place 66 years after the close of the previous entry in the franchise. Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) lives as a historical expert at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. still mourning the loss of her love Steve Trevor in 1918. Kristen Wiig plays Barbara Minerva a cliche version of a woman overlooked and ignored by the world while Pedro Pascal plays Max Lord the central villain of the piece conman and television personality the propels what passes as the central plot of the movie.

Drowning itself in the period’s clothing and style, Wonder Woman 84 is a mess. Elaborate and expensive sequences take place that have no function in furthering the plot or developing the characters. No thought is present for the actual consequences of the choices the writers made when they crafted the script. The special effects suffer from the issue that the digital characters seem to lack weight and float when they should not and perhaps worse of all the plot suffers from that most horrid comic book trope Powers ex machina, with Wonder Woman developing sudden abilities that exist solely to resolve an immediate plot complication and are then discarded.

I found it impossible to surrender myself to the story and was constantly reminded the artifice with repeated errors of the type. Wonder Woman I found to be charming and fun though far from perfect and its sequel, though far from the dour, depressing, Objectivist works of the Snyder Batman and Superman films, I cannot recommend at all.

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Without Grogu is There a Story?

Light Spoilers for the Entire Run of The Mandalorian to date.

The Mandalorian is Disney +’s original Star Wars series set during the period after the fall of the Galactic Empire and before the events of The Force Awakens. Its central and titular character is Din Djarin an orphan raised in a Mandalorian creed that emphasizes warrior qualities and religious devotion to never revealing one’s face to another living being. Mandalorian in the lore of Star Wars are a people and a belief that are currently suffering a diaspora after the conquest of their home-world with many serving as mercenaries and bounty hunters. Din lives as a bounty hunter in a near sociopathic existence without compassion or remorse until a contract has him ‘obtaining’ an asset the child ‘Grogu’ or better known popularly as ‘Baby Yoda.’ Din forms a bond with the 50-year-old child and ends up forsaking his bounty hunter life with a quest to reunite the child with the Jedi that are responsible for Grogu.

Over the course of two season Din and Grogu encounter many characters, some original to the show some from other Star Wars properties until in the final episode of season two Grogu departs with a jedi master with Din revealing his face to the child before their farewell.

The Mandalorian has been a major success for Disney penetrating deep into the cultural conversation, drawing subscribers to their streaming service, and igniting fresh enthusiasm for a franchise more than 40 years old but I wonder what happens next?

I have enjoyed the series, but I also see that the episodes are often very light ion story while heavy on plot. An entire episode will be devoted to a single plot point, infiltrating an Imperial base to gain access to a piece of datum that moves the plot forward but in terms of character has very little to say. The only powerful story element of the series has been the transformation of Din because of his bond with Grogu and with Grogu departure what is there that is emotionally compelling about Din’s adventures? The series had first-rate action, ground-breaking visual effects, and a radical approach to placing actors and characters into fantastic settings that is going to change the industry forever but none of that is gripping emotional storytelling. Grogu is the reason the series has exploded culturally; Din is a cypher, and it is very difficult to make a cypher a compelling character. Not impossible mind you, mysterious samurai and gun slingers without names have carried film franchises for a few films but that’s a shorter run than a television series.

Only time and another season will show if the writers of the Mandaloriancan expand their show beyond spectacle, action, and ‘easter eggs’ of fan lore.

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