Pop Culture - Secrets, Lies, Spacemen and Big Monsters

Spoilers again...

Life on Mars - Part One

The second episode of season four of For All Mankind ambled along at an interesting pace. Danielle Poole arrives on Mars to take over as CO from Ed Baldwin, who is still reluctant to leave Happy Valley, while Toby Kebbell's Miles Dale is finding life below ground, as a grunt, a little demeaning and not at all what it was advertised on the tin. However, Danielle isn't there for fun and soon realises that the grunts are disgruntled and starts by fixing something that Ed didn't feel was necessary to fix - the broadband connection to the lower decks. Miles has a meeting with Ed and doesn't get what he thought, but is eventually given some hope that his two years there won't all be miserable.

Meanwhile Kelly Baldwin, who has just had the funding withdrawn from her eight year robotics project, meets Aleida Rosales, who, while still suffering from PTSD goes back to NASA for her old job and ends up telling them where to stick it. The two of them get very drunk and hatch a plan to save both of their careers.

Over in the Soviet Union it looks very much like what happened in the 1990s is about to happen in 2003 as the fall of the USSR suddenly happens around Margo's ears and she just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It ends with her being carted away by the Russian police. 

It's That Time Again

It's time travel time as The Lazarus Project returns for a second season and we're stuck in the middle of the new three week time loop with no good happening from it apart from they creep along towards a solution by being able to remember what happened in the last loop. This, obviously isn't good for Shiv as he's still being shot by George (excellently played by Paapa Essiedu, who manages to do bewildered and funny very well), but for others it's allowing some good to come out of all of this mess.

The opening episodes see the team expand and disperse, recruiting Rebrov to help save the world and try to find a way to travel back to 2012, where Janet has been sent with Cassie, her daughter. Then it all goes a wee bit timey wimey as George accidentally activates the newly discovered time machine under a Swiss mountain and the three week time loop now has anomalies in it that have never happened before.

But that's nothing to what is going to happen as everything starts to get very complicated... The team discover that the reason for the three week loop might be closer to home than they realise and they are literally in a race against time to come up with their own time machine to go back a year and prevent the second singularity from being created, except the problem closer to home has other ideas and they, at first, end up in 2018 in what is essentially a light-hearted interlude (although given the amount of death in it, it isn't that light-hearted), before going back to 2012 and encountering their own project and earlier versions of some of them. This is a paradox inside a paradox inside a series of paradoxes and if you watched Bodies and thought that was confusing then wait until you get introduced to a causal loop - its like the grandfather paradox but nuclear powered.

However, without giving too much away the last few episodes kind of meandered around a bit and I had a lot of problems with it. Not necessarily the paradoxical aspect, more to do with general logic. George is a great character, but he's not a good explainer, so when the raid back to 2012 goes tits up and he needs to get Wes to reset time to allow them to complete their mission to prevent the world from ending, he doesn't particularly put the point across very well and resorts to doing what he was hinted he might do; Sarah was with him and when she persuades Wes to reset time she doesn't bother to tell her that if the Lazarus people from 2024 don't succeed the world will end because of another singularity and resetting it won't matter. It's straightforward logic and might have saved an entire episode of pfaffing about.

The denouement also leaves a lot to be desired with the person who betrays the team not looking at the bigger picture and being sucked into Wes's generally evil intentions. I saw the final scene miles off. In fact the only characters who come out of this with any respect are Shiv and Rebrov - the former doing the right thing and the latter proving that he's far more the hero and the Lazarus Project are really the bad guys. This has been a really excellent and slightly mind-blowing time travel series let down by the ending and the fact it's now distinctly possible that a third series will be on the horizon - I mean there is a conclusion but there are so many loose ends you wouldn't think it was an ending. Another series wouldn't be a bad thing, but it would be nice to have some form of resolution and maybe another threat rather than this almost endless loop of trying to solve problems they themselves cause. It feels a little like a Marvel comic - we're being subjected to the illusion of change and nothing more. I will, of course, watch season three if it happens, but I'd like there to be an ending.

Falling Flat

As an aside, there's been a bit of a resurgence from Flat Earthers recently; from my mate Mo getting sanctioned by Facebook for showing a joke meme about it to absolute wankers posting 'reels' on the platform 'proving' inconclusively that the world is flat and there's nothing else anywhere except us...

Did you know that the Flat Earth Society has over a quarter of a million members (all around the globe)? That's an awful lot of extraordinarily stupid people who will believe any old nonsense to try and get Elon Musk to allow them on his spaceship. The weird thing is I actually knew two people who believe the earth is flat and that the moon landings were staged and that at least as many people who belong to the FES will have been sworn to secrecy not to divulge the truth about it and over 50 years later not one of them has said 'it was all staged' - not even someone on his death bed who had no family to worry about being killed by the CIA... Seriously mad tosspots, the lot of them...

I think of all the conspiracy theorists out there the people who believe we live on a disc are among the most bonkers people to draw breath. What is missing from their lives that they can determinately believe there are hundreds of thousands of people out there dedicated to a lie that benefits no one? What possible benefits would there be from hiding a fact about the planet (or disc) and then bribing or threatening millions of people to continue this bonkers lie? How come no one with an iota of scientific knowledge, former NASA employees or any other space agency just come out and said, "It's all a lie. There's no space, no gravity, it's all bullshit so that you can be controlled, because if you knew the world was flat you wouldn't be able to be controlled any more..." I actually think the FES was created by someone having a laugh to see just how many wankers he could get to follow him. In fact, their Facebook page resorts to insulting anyone who questions their beliefs, rather than offering up proof or testimony from anyone who doesn't whoop whoop when sitting on the toilet.

Cartel Games

We finally got around to watching Sicario 2: Soldado and while it was another example of true American horror stories, it fell a little flat compared to the first film which pushed all the right buttons. This time around there was a disjointed and slightly erratic feel to the story.

I think this is because it starts out as one thing and becomes something else entirely. The film starts with what appear to be a suicide bomber crossing the US/Mexican border who then blows himself up when confronted by the Border Guard and quickly switches to a Kansas City supermarket where four more suicide bombers kill 18 people. Cut to Josh Brolin threatening a Somalian pirate for information and thinking that the Mexican drug cartels are smuggling jihadists through Mexico into the USA. Our CIA buddies hatch, with the aid of a US senator, a plan to start a drugs war by kidnapping one of the children of the one of the leading cartel leaders and then staging it so they all think each other is to blame - quite what this has to do with suicide bombers seems a little vague. This is where the film starts to go a little wonky as it soon becomes clear that the suicide bombers weren't anything to do with the cartels and the guy on the border might have just been a fanatic.

However, Brolin, Benicio del Toro and their team have already snatched the daughter of the top man of one of the cartels, this happens to be the same man who killed all of del Toro's family prior to the first film. The plan is to put the girl in protective custody in the middle of a rival cartel's territory and sit back and wait for the war to start, but corruption spreads far and wide in Mexico and when the state police try and ambush their own convoy to try and... well, I'm not sure because by this point in the film the narrative is kind of lost and you don't really know what the hell is going on. The bottom line is the girl escapes and Toro is charged with chasing her and bringing her back. What he doesn't know is the US govt. has decided they've caused far too much of an international incident and want the girl and Toro eliminated. What follows is a fulfilling denouement, even if it continues with the same disjointed feel. It's a good film but I don't know if stuff got lost on the cutting room floor or the idea was to show how things go tits up and change quickly, I just felt it all seemed a tad confusing and as clear as mud...

A Bunch of Unpleasant People

There were fewer flashbacks and more time spent with the arseholes in the latest instalment of A Murder at the End of the World as Darby starts to follow her instincts regarding the murder and seems to fall foul of everyone there. You start to wonder just why she was invited when all she does is solve crimes and wrote a book when all the others have something 'important' to offer. This is why I likened it to the second Knives Out film from last year.

There's an intriguing premise at work here, but the millionaires, artists, hackers and assorted wankers that billionaire Andy has assembled in Iceland are all incredibly irritating and the mystery is marred by the fact that apart from Darby you really don't give a flying shit if they all die, which given the similarities to Ten Little Indians, is precisely what looks like happening when the second guest keels over and dies just as he decides to tell Darby everything he knows about Bill's death. Half the guests are arrogant wankers while the other half are self-important blowhards and when Andy Ronson tells Darby she's no longer welcome at his retreat because there isn't a murder to investigate and puts her on the next flight out of Iceland your guilt detector is focused directly on him, but unless there's a double whammy at play here he's not going to be the killer. 

Just to obfuscate things; Ronson's kid Zoomer yet again plays a significant role while staying in the background; Britt Marling really isn't a good actor and some of the scenes were obviously shot on a set rather than outside in the Icelandic wilds. There's an army of AI robots building something odd; there's people wearing masks, the staff are not at all helpful and to keep harping on about it, you wonder why Darby's been brought there unless this is some kind of set up or they're playing an elaborate murder mystery. The rate we're going the killer is going to be Ray - the AI. The few flashbacks we had this week were focussed on Darby and Bill getting closer to uncovering who the silver jewellery serial killer is, but there simply wasn't enough of this and you get the feeling that it would have made a far better series without this Icelandic bollocks getting in the way of an interesting story.

Here Be Monsters

The wife isn't especially keen on Monarch: Legacy of Monsters but I'm not letting that get in the way, because this is a fun TV series with big creatures, an interesting story and frankly it's got a lot more going for it than the films, which have tended to be great action sequences with duff human involvement, especially when the massively overrated Millie Bobby Brown has been involved.

Episode three ramped up the action and the intrigue as Lee Shaw and his three young pals break out of the Monarch 'retirement' home and head for South Korea where an old friend of Lee's is on hand to help them out of crisis. Meanwhile, we get introduced to the woman who appears to be leading Monarch now as she makes it clear that Lee and Hiroshi Randa's notes need to be found, whatever the cost. Lee's buddy provides them with a plane as they head towards Alaska and the last known destination of the missing Hiroshi and it's here they run into the latest Monster of the Week (as pictured). Back in the 1950s, we get our first glimpse of Godzilla as the US military decides to blow an atomic bomb up next to him, leaving the proto-Monarch to think that big green has been vaporised... Heh, little do they know... I don't understand the wife's general disdain, I thought everyone loved a good monster and this series has had quite a few so far.

Operatic Musings

The last time we saw Peter Dinklage was in Game of Thrones and while he has been in other things, there has been nothing we've watched; for a quality actor that doesn't feel enough, but his latest movie She Came To Me is kind of in the vein of the excellent The Station Agent, which we watched long before he became famous and I remember it for being a simply delightful but odd. The same can be said for this movie; it's certainly on the unusual side.

Co-starring Anne Hathaway and Marisa Tomei, Dinklage plays an opera composer who is having something of an existential crisis. It's been five years since his last hit opera, but he's lost his confidence and has a block that even his OCD therapist wife can break him out of. Yet this isn't really the crux of the film because we also have a teenage love story going on in the background - involving Hathaway's son from her first marriage and his relationship with the daughter of her new house cleaner, who is herself in a difficult marriage because her husband is pretty much a grade A arsehole, who also happens to be a LARPer. To make matters worse, Hathaway plays a women who had a Catholic mother and a Jewish father and is herself having her own existential crisis because she wants to give all their belongings away and become a nun - mainly because she feels they have much simpler lives surrounded by the kind of order she wants in her own life.

Then there's Marisa Tomei's Katrina, a tug boat captain who is suffering from a romance disorder - which is essentially that she craves relationships and becomes obsessed with anyone she shags. She bumps into the disillusioned Dinklage in a seedy bar, takes him back to her tug boat, seduces him and changes his life completely. What follows is a strange, slightly surreal tale that you can never be sure where it's going and has some very unusual things happen in it that you feel are almost for a psychiatrist's chaise lounge rather than a movie. Worth watching even if it feels a little... sordid and slightly wrong.

Life on Mars Part 2

Finally. The third episode of For All Mankind has, at last, got back into the groove that made it the consistently best thing on TV for the last three years. This show is at its best when it defies the odds and goes against the norm; when the characters challenge the narrative and do what is necessary rather than what is expected and this week's second helping was the perfect example.

Kelly and Aleida take their proposal to all the major players in space tech and get kicked back every time; it seems no one wants to invest in finding life on Mars. So they take their idea to former Helios boss Dev who also kicks them back, except this time Kelly mentions her mother, the woman who basically stuck a knife in Dev's back and took his company away from him and that seems to spur the former tech billionaire and genius out of his hibernation and solitude, as this new team take the fight to the Helios board. We see a welcome return of Bill, aka Peanut, but Aleida fails to persuade him to come and work for her at Helios, even though he is a shareholder. He does play a huge part in making Aleida realise she has PTSD.

Meanwhile on Mars, Ed and Sveta start to have eyes for each other over Ed's Mars grown weed, which they're using as a pain relief drug and it's clear that Ed is suffering from Parkinson's. Miles gets himself an extra job working for the Russian black market guru and does something he's been strictly forbidden to do and makes contact with the North Koreans. He's also finally making some money - from his less than legal activities - which might persuade his estranged wife not to move out of the family home. While in Russia, Margo faces an episode of sheer hell as the new Russian Revolution goes an unexpected way and she's suspected of being in thrall with a KGB head who might be one of the perpetrators of Gorbachev's downfall; however despite some quite haunting experiences for her, things might just be looking up. This felt like a real return to form, but it might have been as brilliant as ever, it was just up against something very special...

Lessons in Sheer Television Brilliance

I'm of the opinion that Lessons in Chemistry might be one of the best television series I have ever watched in my 61 years on the planet. It's like the prefect LP; one with X number of tracks on it and every single one of them an absolute banger. It is such a perfect TV show that a couple of times during the final episode I found myself welling up. I cannot recommend a TV series more than this; it is and was an absolute joy to watch and while not everyone had a happy ending, there was enough sheer brilliance to go round so those who it didn't quite work out for still had light to bask in.

It would appear that my prediction from last week was almost nailed on. This was really all about Calvin. Elizabeth Zott, her precocious daughter Mad, their fantastic neighbour Harriet, and all the other characters who helped weave this delightful tapestry of joy were just players in a bigger, bolder and brave story about how one tragic man could have such an influence on everybody whose life he touched. The fact that he was only ever there in spirit for the last six episodes was not an issue, because this was all about Calvin and like I said last week, there hasn't been such a likeable and totally fantastic character in a TV series ever.

I don't really want to spoil anything, but I've given much away over the last eight weeks and if you ever do get the chance to watch this I doubt the bits I've touched upon will stick in your memory, only, I hope, that I thought it was simply a heavenly piece of television and that you do to. This week Elizabeth quits her job, Mad finds her grandmother, Harriet's dreams are smashed, Walter gets propositioned and everything ends up being fine. It almost seemed too quick, but the final scene with Elizabeth and Mad surrounded by their extended family with Calvin looking on approvingly from the kitchen, which Elizabeth converted into a laboratory, almost made me lose it. I simply can't think of enough superlatives for this. I have no idea why I should think this was probably one of the best things I've ever watched; it simply was. I will be very surprised if this love story come social historical commentary is ever bettered. I'd give it 11 out of 10 and still think that's not a high enough mark. Find it, watch it and love it.

West is Best

Bill Bailey's Western Australia expedition takes a more gentler pace with the second part as he drives 10 hours north of Perth and swims with whale sharks, meets a woman who is an expert on microbial lifeforms, explores what used to be a coral reef that's now five miles inland and visits Northampton, which appears to have more bins per square kilometre than people. It's your average travelogue fair, Bailey is okay, but I feel the man who used to have me in fits of laughter has never been the same since winning that dancing competition; he no longer seems as surreal and off-kilter as he used to be; it's like he's become a bit too mainstream. Still, it's interesting enough and fills an hour when there's nothing else on apart from fascists eating insects in some other part of Australia...

Swampy Nonsense

"That felt a little like a TV movie," was the comment the wife made about The Marsh King's Daughter, a film starring the excellent Ben Mendelsohn and the overrated Daisy Ridley. To be fair it did feel a little like a Made for TV thing and it might have been, I have no idea, nor do I care to find out. It was okay, nothing special and felt like a bit of a waste for such an excellent actor like Mendelsohn, but he was recently in Secret Invasion so his quality threshold has obviously gone down the toilet since the fantastic The Outsider.

What we have here is a film that examines a control freak at work, but not your average one. Mendelsohn plays Jacob Holbrook, a man of the wild who lives in isolation with his wife and daughter and for much of the opening 20 minutes you think it's an idyllic set-up focusing on a loving father and daughter, but there are cracks around the edge, such as why the mother looks like she hates life and how Holbrook has a thing for tattooing his daughter. When a man on a quad bike strays into their territory lost and in need of help, the mother goes berserk, begging the man to leave and take her and her daughter with him and then BAM! He gets shot from a distance away and the daughter, Helena is fighting her mother to prevent her from being taken away from her father. The mother goes to drastic measures to get her daughter on the quad bike and she wakes up in a police station in the middle of a civilisation she had no idea existed. After a failed attempt to escape and be reunited with her father, who is now wanted for murder, the clock jumps 20 years.

Helena is now married with her own daughter; she's hiding all of her strange tattoos and she seems happy even if she appears to have some hang ups. Then her father escapes from a prison van, the FBI turn up - treating us to a ten minute segment that just further compounds my belief that the USA is a fascist dictatorship disguised as the Land of the Free. There's a car accident and the police and FBI declare Holbrook dead and everyone can go back to their lives, except Helena's husband is a bit sceptical about his wife and there's a lot of work to be done. Then Helena starts to think her father might not be dead and she has to use all the skills he taught her as a child to determine the truth from a growingly obvious fake trail. The rest is an attempt at an action adventure type of resolution, but as the wife said, it all felt a little PG13 and not really something to get excited about...

Animated Stuff

A brief mention for something we've obviously watched but I forgot. Season three of Love, Death and Robots came out last year and I thought we'd missed it, but not the case as we got to the second episode and the wife told me exactly what was going to happen. We watched three episodes in all and I couldn't remember any of them apart from a vague recollection, but enough to know we'd seen them and wouldn't bother with the rest. LD&R isn't a bad series; it has stunning visuals and some of it has excellent SF stories, but if I had to stick my neck out I'd say only about a quarter of the episodes in total are any good, the rest being derivatives of better known stories, rip offs and poor attempts at being cutting edge.

Next Time...

It feels like this week hasn't been as fruitful or productive as previous weeks and despite three excellent TV shows - one of which finished - compared to recent weeks it all felt a little like an anti-climax, despite me declaring Lessons in Chemistry as one of the best TV shows I've ever watched. The coming weeks promise very little apart from For All Mankind and the second half of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters and that's because we're fast approaching Christmas, which will be in a month.

There is Doctor Who to dissect next week; my feelings are this - I expect Russell T Davies to bring the Doctor back after a number of years where it/he/she has been missing in action; he obviously knows how to find the right buttons to push and I expect a lot from what is to come - I might be setting myself up for a heap of disappointment, but, the trailers for the upcoming three specials all look fabulous and I have to admit I'm a fan of David Tenant's Doctor, even if he looks like he's been out on the town for a very long piss up! I'm not even too bothered about Donna Noble returning as this does feel like they've been brought back to tie up a loose end or two. Plus, compared to some of the more recent companions, at least Donna was something different.

The rest of the week looks a little barren and devoid of anything to get excited about; it might be time to explore some of the series we overlooked in 2023; to return to things we've watched over the last few years and to bite the bullet and watch some of the things on the Flash Drive of Doom that we've avoided for one reason or another. Whatever we sit down to watch, you'll be the first to hear about it.