What are you watching?

[Kyle]

[buckett]

[El Jefe]

The Expanse Season 4, around adapting to the schedule for the shiny new job.

It was fucking awesome, no real surprise. There's an awful lot of shows out there that should be taking notes on how to handle creative teams and showrunning from this crew.

[El Jefe]

This is why other productions need to be taking notes on how The Expanse production handles creatives. Because yes please, way more of this.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-expanses-we ... 1839942193

(Spoilers in the article for season 4).

[Mike]

Wayward Pines

Matt Dillon and Shannyn Sossamon and Carla Gugino and Terrance Howard in an engaging mystery about an FBI agent investigating the strange, isolated town of Wayward Pines, Idaho. It hooked me from episode 1, but I was immediately worried this was going to be like Lost or any of those fictionalized Serial-style mystery podcasts where a great hook devolves without a satisfying payoff. But then halfway through season 1, the mystery is completely revealed, and that means that it turns into a completely different style of show. After the reveal, I watched one more episode to confirm that this really is where the show is going, and it seems like it is. So now it's no longer a mystery and instead is a survival horror/thriller. No thanks. I'm out.

I mean... maybe there's more to the show after this, but I don't really care anymore.

[Phoebe]

OK so maybe I should be watching The Expanse?

[Stan]

[El Jefe]

Yes. Then again, I'm terribly biased. Because I'd tell everybody to watch the show. And then read all the books. And then rewatch the show. And then re-read the books. Repeat forever. Because I fucking love so much about both of them. And I want my nine books and nine seasons, damn it.

But that's really not fair, because it's not a show that is going to work for everybody. What I would say, is even if you *don't* watch, do yourself the favor of tracking down some of the drone shots they use from the quarry that stood in for an alien planet in season 4. Because they're utterly amazing, and serve really well to remind just how much "alien" shit we've got right here. It's a haunting, weird landscape, and largely untouched by digital FX/editing in the shots.

But even setting aside the awesomeness of what Wes is doing with the character of Amos, yeah, there's a whole lot of reasons to give some love to the Expanse. It would require a longer post to cover the reasons to watch, and that requires more spoons than I have available currently.

[El Jefe]

So, if you were on the fence about watching the Witcher? You should end up on the side of the fence where you definitely don't watch it.

Also, just all the content warnings. All of them. Repeatedly. And then repeat them all like three to six more times. Per episode.

It's not a very good show. There's a whole lot of reasons why, all of them delving deeply in the history of this franchise and the history of the lore itself. None of them are really important. It's just kind of pretty bad. You get stronger than expected acting from Cavill, stronger than expected fight choreography...and that's it. Everything else (writing, directing, cinematography, most of the rest of the actors) is far worse than expected.

Just don't.

[El Jefe]

In the Shadow of the Moon. Don't read spoilers. Don't think about it. Just watch it. It's not groundbreaking, it's not some new concept. It's just a really solid murder mystery with some sci-fi elements, packaged in an well-directed movie, with some outstanding acting. Seeing Boyd Holbrook doesn't hurt either.

And for those wondering, as it is based in Philly, yes, they did their Philly homework quite well. The dude who played Dexter on TV nails a very particular accent, specific to a certain region of the city, for his Philly cop role. They got the skyline right, across multiple decades. They even got KYW's callsign right, with the appropriate bumper music for the specific decade. Hell, they even managed to make a reference to Channel 5.

It's well worth the watch on Netflix. Like right now.

[Kyle]

[Phoebe]

Tried the Expanse but it was so noisy and random... Need to try again when I'm less sleepy. Some interesting ideas but lots of unnecessary flashing lights and beeping. Enjoy shows with lots of slow shots of... grass? Trees. Water. Etc. I was telling my kid not to euthanize me when I get old and sit there doing nothing but looking out the window for hours with a yarn ball and stuffed animal.

[Mike]

Undone. It's a rotoscoped show that is technically sci-fi, but I'm two episodes in and it's also a lot about family and the main character's relationships with the people around her. I'm hooked.

The description off IMDB: A woman discovers she has a new relationship with time after surviving a car accident that almost killed her.

I'll report back after I finish.

[Phoebe]

Arrival-ish, maybe? Is it on Netflix or Prime or one of those types?

[Mike]

Prime. And it's trippy but cool. I like the lead, Rosa Salizar; she's very low key and naturally funny*. I think she's perfectly cast here.


*She's a regular on Doug Loves Movies, where she holds her own alongside professional comics.

[DMDarcs]

Currently wading through various TV series on various streaming services. I don't tend to just sit and focus on TV. Some I share with my kids to share the nerdiness.

Agents of Shield; Luke Cage (Netflix); Xena: Warrior Princess (SyFy); Spider-Man; X-Men; The Mandalorian (Disney+); QI; 8 of 10 Cats does Countdown (Britbox).

[El Jefe]

Polar. It's a B, maybe a B-?

Great beginning, kind of "eww" middle, and a solid but not outstanding recovery in the last act. Mads is Mads as always, which means he's lovely and amazingly subtle in a way few other actors pull off. It also doesn't hurt that I think the man actually gets better looking as he gets older. I'd have preferred a tweak to the ending, but it's still fine on its own. Gore content was higher than expected, but I wasn't actually familiar with the comic.

[Phoebe]

Still hoping to watch Undone sometime; started the Expanse and couldn't stick it out, but my husband likes it a lot so I kept dabbling and then finally saw a few really good episodes. Now I'm liking it - I like some of the moral dilemmas and unexpected twists the writers throw in, as those questions of value are much more powerful and challenging in a layered context. Interesting that a show about imaginary futuristic space exploration stuff is so good at presenting more realistically nuanced moral questions, but then, isn't that part of the joy for trekkies for all these years? The Expanse just brings it in a little closer, ha ha.

[Phoebe]

Ok, finally reached a section of the Expanse that is really holding my interest. This to me is a better show about moral and political philosophy than the good place, but I get that mine is an idiosyncratic view!

I watched the first four episodes of Undone and LOVED IT!!!!!! I love all the characters who are indeed perfectly cast, I love the playing with episodes and time, I love the use of the animated drawing style to create special effects, I love the realistic writing about the characters and the situations they're in. It makes me a little bit uncomfortable when they appear to be glorifying mental illness by recasting it as indigenous knowledge, but I think we might need to be particularly suspicious of the character who is saying those things and the main character keeps expressing useful doubts about what is said, so ... maybe that will turn out to be nuanced.

[Zen]

I recently watched the Netflix sponsored Anime series . This is a slice-of-life series about two musicians living on Mars. It takes place nearly 50 years after the Mars colony was founded, with no clear indication of exactly how far in the future that is, though there are a couple of references to modern musicians like Motörhead and a joke about Bruno's concert on Mars that doesn't actually SAY that it's talking about Bruno Mars, and the two young women have no idea what the older character who mentions it is talking about.

While the show is a Japanese Anime, it is one of the rare cases where the dubbed version might be superior to the original Japanese language version. This is because the casting of the two protagonists was done so well that their voices blend nearly perfectly into the vocals of the original artists who perform all of the songs, in ENGLISH. That is one of the keys to the show. The music director for the show is Canadian. The songs are written by, for the most part, a collection of up and coming singer-songwriters types. Late in the second half of the show, there are a couple of rap songs that are actually performed by the songwriter. Yes, they got the guy to write the songs and perform them for the soundtrack. (I'm wondering if he did the voice work for the English Dub as well, but I haven't looked it up.)

For the most part, the music in the show is fantastic and the story is pretty good as well. There are a couple of plot points that are a bit tired and overused or a little unrealistic considering the situation but it's clear that most of those are plot-driven. In other words, things happen the way they do in order to drive the plot. That's not the best way to write a story, but it's not bad enough to make me dislike it.

The two main characters, Carole and Tuesday, are both 17 years old at the beginning of the series. One of them, Tuesday, is running away from home. She is from a rich family and her mother is a prominent politician who is running for President of Mars. It is clear that her mother is making a statement about Trump since she is running a campaign with anti-immigration as one of the key platform points. The other, Carole, is a kid who was left at a church when she was a baby by her parents and was raised in a combination of orphanages and refugee camps. She was born on Earth but moved to Mars over 10 years earlier, despite being 17 years old. (The story doesn't address whether the years they are referring to are Martian Years or Earth Years...) So, basically, Tuesday's mom is campaigning on a platform that would discriminate against her new music partner, an immigrant.

The main "antagonist" in the series, other than the political storyline, is Angela. She's a child actress and model who is trying to shift her career to music at, I'm pretty sure, the age of 17. She is managed by her "mother", who is clearly not her biological mother because she has been altered by something in the Martian environment and has become more and more androgynous over the years, including some violent behavior associated with the extra testosterone in her system. There is another character that this has happened to who has a happier, less anti-trans/non-binary feel to them. They actually identify as non-binary if I recall. I put "antagonist" in quotes because I don't really feel that she is really an antagonist. I almost view her as a third protagonist. She has her own storyline that is almost as interesting as that of the main two. In fact, near the middle of the second half of the show, her storyline becomes really fascinating, if you like watching trainwrecks.

The show is directed by the same director who did the classic show Cowboy Bebop (which is frequently considered to be an inspiration to many of the more recent western SF shows), which explains a lot about why it is as good as it is. If anybody can do science fiction with a musical emphasis, it's him.