Random TV Show Thoughts

[Z Buck McFate]

Potential spoiler about The Last of Us, from the game:

in the game, the surgeon Joel killed turns out to be Ellie's father. Joel lying to Ellie maybe seemed heavy enough with adding that? Or maybe it'll surface next season. Twitter threads mentioning it this week gave me the impression it's something Joel knew when he killed him though.

 

[ceecee]

Started watching Party Down on Starz. I watched the first two seasons like 10 years ago so I was familiar with the story. It's great and the way it's observing the fucking hellworld we live in, while being hilarious, is refreshing.

 

[Totenkindly]

Kinda kicked into high gear on Dark (Netflix). Done with five episodes of Season 1, three to go.

I was really happy with myself for figuring out one of the central mysteries of the season before the actual reveal. Yay, me?

It takes a little time to really learn everyone's name, their relationships, and what they looked like in different time periods since they're played with different cast. But I will say the show does it best to make it easy, with the use of dual-screen montage + the visual cast cast appearance, on a level that matches House of the Dragon in terms of younger vs older selves.

 

[Z Buck McFate]

Mr Show parodied this kid's show back in the 90s, and I had no idea it was based on a real show. Accidentally discovered the original tonight. (It's almost disappointing, like it was funnier standing on its own silliness).

Sam and Criminy Krafft/Mr. Show:

Sid and Marty Krofft:

 

[The Cat]

Mr Show parodied this kid's show back in the 90s, and I had no idea it was based on a real show. Accidentally discovered the original tonight. (It's almost disappointing, like it was funnier standing on its own silliness).

Sam and Criminy Krafft/Mr. Show:

Sid and Marty Krofft:

Ah, the unfiltered horror of HR Puffinstuff...the stuff nightmares are made of...

 

[Totenkindly]

Am I showing my age if I admit I watched HR Pufnstuf as a kid (technically probably early reruns, I was alive but don't remember it until 2-3 years after it originally aired) and then watched Sigmund and the Sea Monster live and had a lunchbox for the latter when I was in first grade?

 

[Totenkindly]

Kinda kicked into high gear on Dark (Netflix). Done with five episodes of Season 1, three to go.

I was really happy with myself for figuring out one of the central mysteries of the season before the actual reveal. Yay, me?

It takes a little time to really learn everyone's name, their relationships, and what they looked like in different time periods since they're played with different cast. But I will say the show does it best to make it easy, with the use of dual-screen montage + the visual cast cast appearance, on a level that matches House of the Dragon in terms of younger vs older selves.

I blew through the rest of the ten Season 1 episodes, so just two seasons left (16 episodes altogether). At some point I crossed the mark into "binge-watch mode" which was nice, although annoying because I shouldn't really watch 16 straight more hours of TV.

Once you learn to recognize all the characters and know the relationships, then it really clicks in.

There was a gonzo plot point in Episode 8 that was gasp-worthy, and i was really interested to see how that would play out.

There's a few more big reveals, including the season finale. The main one did not surprise me but was still pretty cool. Also, it's fascinating how the characters are sketched out over time and become more fully fleshed. I think most of the 2019 kids are okay, just disillusioned, but frankly a lot of the adults a mottled mix of fucked-upness and coping mechanisms. They did a good job of creating character continuity in terms of personality. I think the biggest surprise is one of the characters ending being a lot different than how they seem in the first episode or two... but it's all good too, it makes it more interesting.

I didn't understand why the metacritic score was only a 61 for the first season, although it might be because despite of a few reveals there wasn't as much tied up in Season 1 as I might have hoped for. However, this isn't like complaints about Lost and the polar bear and other gonzo elements that are never satisfactorily dealt with; the plots are actually all pretty coherent.

I think philosophically it actually SHOWS and doesn't just TELL about the big issue between free will and predestination; yes, there's a few sections of character debate but it doesn't feel divorced from reality, it just feels like going satisfactorily deeper down the rabbit hole. When you are driven by instinctive urges deep within you as your "free will" talking, is that actually a choice at all? What created those urges that we don't even understand? Products of forces working on us over a lifetime or something outside of it? It's pretty fascinating stuff, and the show so far is building this world where it both feels like everyone has autonomy and yet it totally driven into certain pathways by forces beyond their awareness. It is SHOWING how everything is working together to provide a sense of inevitability even when characters in the moment seem to be making choices. And there is so much stuff that feels ironic (for example the relationship between Ulrich and Egon -- you'll know it when you see it, it's cynically hilarious how some things don't change). Yes, the show is a slow build over time, but this is a strength in the long run.

It kind of reflects on DEVS from 2020 where it doesn't really seem possible to have free will unless you already know what is going to happen deterministically and thus can simply choose to do not do something that is ordained. When you don't truly know what is ordained and what is not, then how can you possibly make a choice, esp if you don't know why you are making it? People are funny creatures that way.

There's elements of other shows in here too, the occasional line drop. Of course someone would mention a DeLorean. But I'm pretty sure there's a line or two right out of Donnie Darko (which this show sometimes feels like, ambiance wise) and similar films. I'm really loving it. I think I relate the most to Charlotte Doppler, the 2019 police chief who scans as some kind of 5w6 investigator type -- methodical, unflappable, piecing everything together often independently. I love how unrattled she is when other people are losing their shit or even throwing vitriol her way; she remains pretty detached about everything to keep her mind free, aside from the one major relationship in her life where she occasionally shows a bit of distress, and she makes some great intuitive leaps and then just proceeds to dive in by herself to find out the truth.

 

[Z Buck McFate]

Ah, the unfiltered horror of HR Puffinstuff...the stuff nightmares are made of...

I almost feel cheated of nightmare fodder. I somehow still managed to be the scaredest kid on the block without it, so I guess I shouldn't complain.

Am I showing my age if I admit I watched HR Pufnstuf as a kid (technically probably early reruns, I was alive but don't remember it until 2-3 years after it originally aired) and then watched Sigmund and the Sea Monster live and had a lunchbox for the latter when I was in first grade?

You're not much older than me. I'm kinda wondering if kid's shows were somewhat regional, because it isn’t even especially before my time.

 

[The Cat]

Am I showing my age if I admit I watched HR Pufnstuf as a kid (technically probably early reruns, I was alive but don't remember it until 2-3 years after it originally aired) and then watched Sigmund and the Sea Monster live and had a lunchbox for the latter when I was in first grade?

God remember Bozo the Clown? Terrifying. That show was like the Raven for me as a kid.
And my soul from out that clown show projected from my television on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!

 

[Totenkindly]

Just finished s2e6 of Dark ("An Endless Cycle"). That was devastating, I ended up crying a lot through this episode. So much stuff cycles around and becomes apparent. So this is where the long game of show writing pays off, as old carefully established understandings of plot and character are spun on their head and you suddenly break into new awareness of what exactly did happen in sections of the timeline you weren't aware of.

Just mind-blowing so far... and still not at the end of Season 2.

EDIT: Finished Season 2, but I didn't care as much about the last two episodes (as expected for a series like this, at times some twists are feeling like a bit much, although not nearly as bad as some other shows have been) -- although it has a few awesome sequences in it including one of a character going above and beyond to be true to form in a stunning expenditure of resolve and spite that left me laughing hysterically at the audacity of it. I really cannot say more, but... it's still pretty crazy and just awesome even if the character has become irritating.

I think s2e6 is my favorite episode of the season, and definitely one of the emotional high points of the series.

I can honestly say I have no idea how this is all going to tie together in Season 3.

 

[Totenkindly]

As another comment on how well-crafted the elements of Dark are, let's consider the opening sequences. Along with an appropriate smoky/moody theme, the entire thing is a refracted/reflecting kaleidoscope of images. I've seen this occasionally on other shows (and I think the Sandman end credits are the most recent example I can recall). But where Sandman drops the ball is that it just seems to be an attempt to seem artsy, while having no emotional content to the imagery or purpose that meshes form and essence.

However, Dark does mesh form and essence. First of all, the images (which change by season) are actual images taken from the episodes of the season, that are just rather hard to recognize because of how fractured and repeated they are. So if you do recognize it, it will immediately trigger the appropriate emotions attached to that sequence in the show.

More important, the whole point of the show is that that patterns of behavior and events in time are reflective of other periods of time at exact intervals. Everything is a reflection of everything else, and you can't really sunder or separate them, until eventually it all can be both recognizable and yet hard to comprehend -- exactly like the opening sequence. These plot points and characters words and actions are repeating themselves at perfectly spaced points in time, a pattern of synchronous and supportive behavior. It's a perfect style to complement the content of the show, rather than just an attempt to "look cool."

 

[Totenkindly]

Vision Quest Writers Set for Upcoming MCU Disney+ Series

A Disney+ series based on the Marvel Studios character Vision has reportedly been in the works for a couple of months, and according to a new listing, the show has found its writers. A new post on the Writers Guild of America website, which lists Megan McDonnell and Peter Cameron as being in the...

www.yahoo.com

I'm kinda cynical at this stage, although I'll say the two writers they assigned at least wrote episodes and were writer's room folks for Wandavision, so... not a terrible start. If they could get Laura Donney back, I'd feel even better maybe.

 

[The Cat]

All this has happened before and all of it will happen again...
I feel like this is why people quit talking about it in 2020...
According to the lore he was an active drunk on set, and by all evidence pretty childish in a not endearing way, I get the feeling that the flare up last year was people just wanting it to be true because he's kinda obnoxious. But I'm pretty sure he's done with the existing properties for good, people seem to genuinely dislike him.​

 

[Totenkindly]

I finished Dark late last night and now will probably spend the mental 2-3 days to churn through it. Pretty amazing a show like this is airing on USA Netflix, considering how philosophically heady the entire show is and the concepts on which it was developed. It is quite a mix of Christianity, Greek mythology, and Buddhism (ah, another trifecta!) and the audience here is probably least acquainted with the latter although some of our popular works here (like the Matrix later films) dabble in it.

Bittersweet ending. I know the very end might not have landed for some, although it totally makes rational sense. I don't really want to say a ton in non-spoilers, and I could also post pages and pages about this show and how remarkably it was put together. The cool thing is that I've noticed a lot of the foreign shows I've been watching seem to be more emotive than in the past -- sometimes the line deliveries (since they are derived from styles dominant in other countries) and the subtitles themselves create a distance for me, but in the last 2-3 years I've had lots of feels for shows. This was one of them. The whole Jonas and Martha relationship is the core of the show emotionally. And really it's philosophically coherent even when the brain has trouble wrapping itself around all the details. Sometimes it's better just to pull back from trying to decipher and integrate all the details into a coherent map and just see the big picture.

as noted previously, each season's opening credits (using the same theme song) are snapshots of actual 1-2 second parts of the season, but they are short, and refracted/repeated (you'll understand why if you watch), so that they are both eerie and indecipherable and yet feel familiar, yet not really recognizable until in hindsight (which is wild, because there are some real spoileresque shots in there that you simply can't parse until you know their context!). Really inventive and perfectly formed.

Just... bravo.

Some random thoughts, and please do not read if you don't want spoilers:

Hell of a lineup at the final dinner party -- surprising or not? not really, when you take away everyone who existed because of a time loop. But dramatically I think it's hilarious Hannah is still there. Just looking at the show as soap opera, she would have been one of the master queen bitches of the show, who audacity knew no bounds as the season unfolded. [Katharina had her moments as a bully, but we see her fate in the series + enough of her backstory to realize she was in turn abused, so her aggressiveness makes more sense. But we get no context for Hannah and why she did what she did or wanted what she wanted.

Woller never does tell us what happened to his eye. This might have been one of the most subtle yet hilarious running jokes in the series. The last few minutes are the writers jokingly snubbing us a final time.

So really it comes down to feeling like a fever dream. That's not the case in total, as the worlds were actually created, but time travel made them more convoluted and unreal, with reality becoming a sheer hell of sorts. But it's remarkable that the actual story is really centered around what might be a minor character in the series and how that family drama played out -- and how man's desire and pain exceeds his grasp. The inability to grapple with huge pain... the desire to control... the heart wants what it wants, but there are some things that it is not meant to have.

While MARek TAnnhaus is iffy, Sonja as an anagram of Jonas can't really be denied. Of lesser import but of equal interest is how Hanno became Noah.

The two worlds we spend the series aware of: I'm pretty sure they just used the same sets and just inverted the film, as I think some of the character quirks were mirrored rather than appearing the same. Charlotte's eyes, for example, one of her eyes is squintier than the other, but was flipped. I think Claudia's two different colored eyes were flipped. And so on. I'm pretty sure they did this trickery with just flipping the film, and just mocking up the occasional wording that might appear either in the props or via easy CGI.

For the series to work, I felt like Jonas and Martha really had to sell their attraction (something transcending time and space) to each other, two universal spirits in orbit of each other, and Hoffman and Vicari really sold the goods. They took my breath away, and often through an understated performance. I totally bought this.

I thought it was really interesting that Tannhaus needed a replacement Charlotte to anchor him, and there was speculation about what might have happened if he had repeated his initial folly within the looped worlds, splitting them endlessly. dear god...

It was funny how some character traits persisted through worlds. Hannah always wanted Ulrich, at least most of the way through. Ulrich was a habitual cheater; in world #2, he was a cheater on the woman he cheated with. Helge always lost something; attacked as a child, the side of his head was disfigured, while attacked as an adult it was his eye / front of face. Regina always had cancer.

The two world twist seemed really out of the blue at first, then made total sense as the mind moves away from a single-world endless loop into more of a Mobius strip of sorts, where they endlessly loop but cross in the middle to there's two versions of the world that have to repeated, joined at a moment of time (where time briefly stops), thus seeming like two different realities are occurring at once. This is visually perfect as well, because it is the infinity loop itself, even the oroboros represents the single loop. But also... note in actuality that it's only a loop if we are viewing it deterministically; in actuality, the circle exists all at once, just as the infinity loop (which is like two loops) also exists all at once and is really both loops superimposed over each other simultaneously and both already existing. Our brain just finds it easier in a sense to view it as a deterministic loop, going around, alternating back and forth... and yet this is also why we humans get confused as the determinism becomes more convoluted and complex. Again, step back and just see it as two worlds, each feeding into each other, existing simultaneously at all points in time in the loops, so they are completely self-sustaining and fixed... aside from the loophole moment, which I guess is a brief instance where something can "drop out of the loops" and/or is the exit to the minotaur's maze. // Note this also applies to the quantum reality of Claudia sending Jonas into the Original World vs NOT sending him -- basically both the regular time stream and the infinity loop worlds both exist simultaneously for a blip in time, but because there is a reality where Jonas and Martha enter OW to save Tannhaus family, this immediately solidifies that reality and it becomes the outcome, eradicating the choice/reality that contains the Infinite Loop with Adam and Eva's worlds.. The Infinity loop is really fascinating because it only exists for a blip and yet is infinite within itself, all the choices and options existing all at once even if we can try to track it through a deterministic through-line.

Saw a comment about how Mikkel's trick in S1E1 is a shell game that describes the series -- my mind can take that idea and expand it, as the series in a sense is about our getting caught up in all the loops and who is / isn't around or who everyone is, yet both tokens are there at the same and it's all misdirection in terms of the actual problem that needs resolved in order to set things right. You can only solve it by stepping into the world outside the two cups, where the magician is situated.

I might have noted elsewhere this show really reminded me of the film Donnie Darko in some ways, and by the end even moreso. Even aside from the name. Donnie might have special powers that Jonas and Martha don't have per se (aside from being unable to be killed except at the preordained times), but they're trapped in loops. Donnie fixes reality by completing the bootstrap loop, but it ends in his death... and yet he finds piece in that while others grieve. Jonas and Martha fix reality in a different way, by negating the discovery of time travel that originally split the world and cursed it into what amounted to an eternal hell, but it's the same level of sacrifice, resulting in the same level of bittersweetness -- all the protagonists find something enduring / some kind of peace, but it's also an ending.

I could go on but be here for days.

Before I depart, here are two reddit threads that are actually very very useful and informative, after the series has been viewed, to fill in gaps and discuss the underlying concepts of the show.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DarK/comments/hj6zer
https://www.reddit.com/r/DarK/comments/hk6e1l
We are a perfect match; never believe anything else.

 

[Kingu Kurimuzon]

I’m dying of laughter at this guy’s imitation of Ashton Sanders.

[video]

This show is epic and Sanders is good but his voice sounds nothing like the real RZA

 

[Kingu Kurimuzon]

I’m glad Masta Killa got an expanded role in season three. Sad this show is ending but it seems like a logical place to conclude the saga

 

[The Cat]

I remember when streaming was fun. I remember thinking, enjoy it while you can, because its just a matter of time before it becomes just as awful as cable television, I fucking hate oligopoly.​

 

[Totenkindly]

I remember when streaming was fun. I remember thinking, enjoy it while you can, because its just a matter of time before it becomes just as awful as cable television, I fucking hate oligopoly.​

Well, while I hate it too, there was a time in the not so distant past where if you missed a show, you would be fortunate to catch a rerun somewhere... and the rerun schedule was not in your control. When cable and VCRs took off, maybe you could record a show episode for later watching and have it.

We got very spoiled by not only having a lot of shows available online or via streaming, but being able to pick and choose when to watch a specific episode.

So yeah, this is a backslide, and it sucks that it is happening out of financial issues,limiting our viewing options. But The picnic is over.

 

[chickpea]

Beef is a great show, my favorite thing I’ve watched since White Lotus. Highly recommend

 

[Julius_Van_Der_Beak]

Beef is a great show, my favorite thing I’ve watched since White Lotus. Highly recommend

I don't get it. This has like nothing to do with meat.