In these end of times - famine, pestilence and war - the only thing we have is the television to remind us of our mortality, or the things we no longer have or the situations we're glad we've never faced... yet.
So I'm going to kick off with something I ended with last time...
Raised by Wolves has to be the oddest thing on TV. I said it really needed to up its game and it seems the people who made the show have done just that. It's utterly bonkers, makes no sense and suggests that mankind were settlers on Earth from this other planet. It's choc-a-block full of bizarre characters, weird monsters and acid seas. The acting is stilted, almost like the cast were deliberately told to copy the last am dram show they saw and the story seems to be like a stream of consciousness, going in whatever direction it feels like. There are undersea creatures that steal babies and live in seas of boiling acid and there are ancient androids that can regrow themselves, oh and you have Mother, Father and they're brood of protectorates. Mother is a Necromancer - an android capable of destroying cities, while Father is a docile, slightly naïve character who seems to have lost his direction. Then there's Marcus, who was superhuman but isn't anymore (or is he?); he was an atheist infiltrator but now is a converted Mithraic; his wife Sue who was a doctor, who briefly became a fruit-giving tree but her fate is undecided as she was recently eaten by the floaty snake dragon thing... There are killer child androids with no faces and Campion - who is probably the main protagonist - born on the planet, he's utterly annoying, ridiculously trusting and the kid that plays him can't act for toffee... As this shorter season concludes, Mother has been imprisoned by Grandmother, the new video game is slowly brainwashing the atheists who are now viewing Mother as their messiah, Marcus is dead but might not be and they're all slowly transforming into the acid sea aliens. I am not making this shit up.
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The highlight of the year so far has been Yellowjackets. This is a story told mainly in two time zones - 1996 and 2021. In 1996, a team of schoolgirl footballers are heading to the National Finals in a privately owned jet when it crashes in the Canadian wilderness, leaving about 20 survivors. In 2021, we follow the lives of four of those survivors 25 years on, in the knowledge that whatever happened in Canada stayed in Canada, except everyone else wants to know what happened in Canada?
Unlike Raised by Wolves, which I could literally talk about continuously as there is so much going on it and probably wouldn't spoil it for anybody, Yellowjackets is a different beast entirely and talking about it is simply saturated in potential spoilers. The four women, now in their 40s, are all psychopaths in their own way, with exceptional performances from Melanie Lynskey and Christina Ricci - and their 17 year old counterparts; but it's what actually happened in Canada that is the main focus. Obviously the adventures of the four psycho survivors is compelling and unexpected, but these people had to have had something devastating - other than surviving a plane crash - happen to them in the wilderness and we've yet to find out what it is yet.
There is, I'm worried to say, an element of Lost in it, because there is something decidedly strange about the place they crashed and the strange log cabin they find to live in, but don't let that put you off because the ten episodes were all excellent. The only thing that worries me is the cliff hanger ending suggests that there's something even odder going on and maybe the four ladies focused on in this first season are the least mad of all those who returned...
You should watch it; it's absolutely fantastic.
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In the last one of these I talked about how Resident Alien felt like it really jumped the shark. A few weeks further on and while it still is a far inferior season to the first, it is, at last, starting to pull together into something that resembles the pace and excellence of the first series. The thing that really sets it apart from most alien TV shows is the fact that Harry's species are actually quite bloodthirsty and savage - just like the humans they want to eradicate. There is a feeling that all the preamble and seemingly wasted episodes in the first half of the season might just have some bearing on the rest of the series. This was kind of confirmed in episode 8 of season two, when all the stuff you were frowning about, thinking they were just padding out and treading water, somehow came home to roost. I'm still not sure how it relates to the ongoing story, but at least we now have an idea why we all wasted hours wondering when something was going to happen.
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We started to watch the sixth and final season of The Expanse. We watched the first episode about a month ago and neither of us have felt compelled to return to it. It feels a little like Babylon 5 when it wrapped up the cosmic story early in season 4 only for the remainder of episodes to never really feel like they were any good (on the whole, they weren't). The Expanse has focused heavily on the Belter story and season 6 is essentially all about that struggle. If there is some conclusion to the ancient alien proto-molecule story then I've not heard about it. Most of the people I know who loved the series have condemned the sixth season as dull, uninteresting and overlong - at just six 50 minute episodes... I may never finish it. That doesn't seem to bother me much.
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Picard is head and shoulders the best Star Trek series to come out since probably The Next Generation. While Disco Very has, at least, finally woken up and done something, Picard simply takes ideas and themes from the past and plays with them in an entertaining and enjoyable way. The problem really is Patrick Stewart, who, as much as love him to bits, is about 120 years old and is becoming frail and it's difficult to imagine him in these situations. This series should have been made 20 years ago when Patrick could still pull it off; the thing is it wouldn't have been and it's only the advent of streaming and saturation of product that has got us to this point. It's still an interesting series that appears to be taking a leaf out of old NG episodes and the still wonderful Star Trek: The Voyage Home.
As for Female Black Jesus Saves the Universe Again, the season concluded with what really felt like the concluding part of the series. It felt like an ending; like the show wasn't going to be renewed so they were tying up loose ends and setting sail into the nearest star. Even Tilly was back for one last display of chunkiness. So imagine my horror to discover that Discovery has been renewed for a fifth season... Except, not in this house. That's it for this Star Trek series and we'll probably give Strange New Worlds a miss as well. The retconning of Spock's family and history has rather spoiled it for me, this and countless other things. Time to say goodbye.
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We've finally started watching Ozark. I've had a number of people recommend this series to me and the reviews I've seen all suggest it's a series we needed to watch, so last week we started... It isn't exactly what I expected, but that's a facile comment because I didn't really know what to expect. I knew it was about an 'accountant' who laundered drug money for a cartel and that it was set in the Ozarks, but after that it was a blank slate.
As I said the other day, it's good but it's certainly not up there with great series such as Breaking Bad and The Sopranos. It's full of characters who are really dislikeable and with the exception of Jason Bateman's Marty Byrd (the main character), I really couldn't give a shit about the fate of anybody. But, here's the thing, even Bateman's character isn't particularly nice; he's a very clever and successful man who just happens to be quite, decent and honest man involved in the worst possible things who allows that culture to become his own life. His wife is an entitled bitch; his daughter even more so and his son is borderline psychopath. The supporting players are all rednecks and hillbillies without a shred of decency among them and what is compelling about it is just how far it will go to compete with great crime shows of the past. I'm sticking with it, but I'd like to see it really go off the rails over the next three seasons.
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My cursory The Walking Dead mention is not a criticism, for once. The final season, split into three eight-part sections is almost two-thirds of the way through and we're deep into The Commonwealth territory. There is at least a feeling of dread about the series once again, except this time it isn't the dead that bring it but the fact the Commonwealth could well be very bad guys indeed. What with the Civic Republic looming large in Fear and the lame World Beyond spin-off, one gets the impression that eventually we're heading for a showdown between all of our hero factions and these two giants of the living world that's left. For anyone that cares, I'm betting 50p the Civic Republic - not their military wing - will end up being the good guys.
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Moving onto films, briefly. I know Ryan Reynolds is an acquired taste; you either love him or hate him and there doesn't seem to be much middle ground with him. Some of his films are great, others are meh, but after the utter disappointment I felt watching Spider-Man; No Way Home, watching Reynolds in The Adam Project (along with Mark Ruffalo and Zoe Saldana) was a breath of fresh air. I thoroughly enjoy a good time travel caper and this certainly ticked all the boxes. It was also over an hour shorter than the Spider-Man film, which suggests to me that Marvel's films can't just be 90 or 100 minute self-contained treats - like Iron Man - and have to be bloated and full of navel-gazing and unnecessary bullshit.
Oddly enough that last sentence seems to be how I'm feeling about the forthcoming Moon Knight series, debuting on Disney+ in about ten days. I know a lot of people who bang on about not writing the character off or thinking he's just an all-white Batman and many of them site the Bill Sienkiewicz drawn issues of his comic in the late 1980s and 1990s, but I simply never got the character. For me he was just Marvel's Batman copy with some mystic Egyptian shit thrown in to obfuscate the obvious rip-off.
This forthcoming series honestly fills me with no real feelings at all - it will exist, like Corrie or Peaky Blinders (both of which I've never watched). Apart from never really liking the character, I'm not a huge fan of Oscar Isaac; I can take or leave (mainly leave) Ethan Hawke and having seen a number of trailers for it, I just wish I probably didn't have to watch it...
Just to make matters worse, the first trailers for Ms Marvel fell in the last week or so and it appears that this will be a series designed for the 8-11 years bracket and while it probably won't be it kind of pisses me off so much more than Marvel's incoming Batman rip-off.
Ms Marvel will feature heavily in the next Captain Marvel film, now called Marvels presumably because Brie Larson's Captain Marvel wasn't the multi-billion dollar smash that some other Marvel films have been and they could be seen pandering to the fan element that hated her being cast in the first place. Now unless Marvels is going to be a teen superhero film, I can't see the point of targeting the trailers for Ms Marvel to pre-teens. I mean, it's not likely to have old farts like me falling over themselves to watch it, nor do I think that anyone who hasn't got kids or falls outside of the demographic they appear to be aiming at. In fact I'm struggling to understand why Marvel and the MCU is going in the direction it is. It's not just the Multiverse, it seems, but also more emphasis on the cosmic and the mystic. Everything is as clear as mud at the moment, something you could never accuse Phases one thru four of ever being.
I have been accused of being a curmudgeonly old git who refuses to accept the direction the MCU is going. I've almost had arguments with people because I really disliked Eternals, didn't like Shang Chi, think the MCU/Sony Spider-Man films are no better than the shit Sony-on-their-own-ones and I couldn't understand why the hell they didn't make Black Widow as the film to follow Infinity War rather than the Ant-Man and Wasp film - which wasn't bad, but, you know...
Waiting in the wings are the bigger guns; like they've been wheeled out because the new direction isn't making the kind of money they hoped. The Doctor Strange film had better be good because employing Sam Raimi to do any film sounds as though it's based on nostalgia and belief rather than using any common sense - he's a dreadful director with a catalogue of crap films with only The Quick and the Dead having any redeeming features and that was a heavily-stylised 'western'.
This will be followed by Thor: Love and Thunder with Natalie Portman becoming the God of Thunder and likely to feature The Guardians of the Galaxy and another villain from the Simonsen era of Thor (which, however brilliant, had almost as many corny, duff stories as it had gems).
Is it me or are Marvel wheeling out the remaining 'Avengers' because the other films have simply been shite? Maybe they need to remind people that the characters - who are left - that drew them in originally are still out there doing stuff?
I am also aware that my growing dislike of Marvel films is probably sounding like a stuck record and not going to get a lot of people agreeing with me, but I write blogs like this, I'm not about to ignore Marvel; it's like talking about football generally in 2022 and omitting both Liverpool and Man City from your discussions.
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And that's about it for this time. We have a number of shows to catch-up on and some new ones that sound intriguing. From appears to be another weird series with inescapable scenarios and, um, monsters, while there's obviously going to be a slew of other new things that'll land in the next couple of months. There's my promised final round up of the non-MCU Marvel films that we have to watch - Elektra, the two 21st century Punisher films, which I expect will be as bad as they're rated on IMDB and a bunch of other films that we have but can't find the enthusiasm to watch. By the time I pluck up the guts to watch them Dr Strange and the Multiverse of Madness will have its cinematic release and as I said earlier this is a film that might just drive the final nail in the coffin of my MCU infatuation. I'm also finding the DC films to be hit or miss affairs, but on a basic level some of them have been more enjoyable than I expected. That doesn't mean I'll be rushing out to see a Batman or another Aquaman film, but Black Adam, The Flash and another Shazam film will be welcome changes, I hope.
I'm getting recommendations from people, which I kind of want to try, but I also kind of don't, because people have differing tastes to me and I'm often let down because I expect more and they don't fulfil the initial promise. I still feel reluctant to get involved with many UK-based dramas, mainly because the number of people who recommend them is balanced by people who don't rate them and I know I should gauge them for myself, but you simply can't escape other opinions and they influence me more than I should allow...
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