I’ve watched a lot of things in the last year and wrote some thoughts down about them but then never got around to posting them until now… So after the cut, thoughts on Foundation, The Winter King, Invasion, Class of ’09 and The Last of Us. I have more tv shows that probably get posted at some point!
Re-watched season 1 because my local library has the Blurays. Re-affirmed that Viserys is a weak but well-meaning King and the Paddy Considine did a great job playing him. I didn’t really understand how great until I watched season 1 and 2 back to back. His absence is truly felt once the character passed.
Ser Criston Cole is the biggest hypocrite every to hypocrise, prone to uncontrolled fits of rage and completely unfit to be Kingsguard. I still can’t believe he survived murdering a member of a royal wedding party by literally beating a him to dead pulp. Viserys quietly gaining more and more sores and losing fingers over the season was somehow very funny this time around. And Alicent really didn’t love at least Aegon, judging by the scenes where she is completely emotionally unresponsive to crying toddler-Aegon and that whole “imbecile” response in the carriage in response to Aegon’s question about whether she loves him or not – I truly believe that the whole reply would be “Imbecile… Of course I don’t.” had the scene gone on.
A few season 2 thoughts:
Season 2 finished exactly where season 1 left off: on the verge of the same exact war! There’s really bad things going on with the pacing of this show. The last episode of season 2 felt more like the penultimate episode than the finale of the season.
That said, I do like season 2 a lot. Acting, costuming, locales, settings… all good. Some of the scenes and dialogue are great too. It’s just the pacing: like the writers are jumping from important event to important even without doing the character work that leads to and from them. I think maybe they are trying to tell a convoluted, sprawling story with many important, pivotal characters in too few episodes and the pacing suffers great from it.
I like the castles and the other settings and find the actors very enjoyable and the characters entertainingly awful. I’m not really rooting for anyone personally, the only reason I think Rhaenyra should be Queen and ruler of all of Westeros is because she is the heir Viserys officially named. The Greens can tell all the lies they want, and pretend to believe in Aegon’s legitimacy all they want – the truth is that Alicent willfully misunderstood Viserys’s last words in the way that benefits her personally the most. Personally I think actually all of them are unfit to rule and would be awful about it.
I’m disappointed that Aemond was made into a caricature of evil brother, both in behaviour and how he’s styled and the way he moves. And the styling and moving reminds me so, SO much of the Wraith from Stargate: Atlantis! At first when Ewan Mitchell took over the role in his white wig, eye patch and long black leather coat by brain tried its damned to see a Wraith!
I’m glad the show finally remembered that Helaena exists! I certainly didn’t until she had to choose which kid is murdered right in front of her eyes. I’m glad she got a little more attention after that.
Daemon was off in his own gothic ghost story for most of the season, and some of those scenes were the funniest. Like Simon Strong’s non-reaction to Daemon’s grand announcement that he’s taken Harrenhal, or when the little Lord Tully insults Daemon up one side and down the other in the course of talking his own Tully bannermen into swearing fealty to himself and by extention to Rhaenyra as the rightful Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, and Daemon couldn’t do a damn thing about it if he wanted those bannermen under his command!
Also loved the bit where Larys Strong said to somebody something to the effect of “Nah, let Daemon take Harrenhall the penniless haunted ruin. The place will drive him barmy while keeping him bogged down in the Riverlands.” Can’t remember the wording but something like that. Hilarious.
I have zero idea how much time has passed since Viserys’s death. Are we talking days or weeks? Or months?? There’s zero sense of how much time passes in season 2.
Still not enough dragons for a show about Dragon Riders! I loved Meleys and Rhaenys remained my favorite until her death. Eve Best and Rhaenys will be sorely missed.
So all in all: I enjoyed season 2 despite its flaws and I’m looking forward to seasons 3 and 4!
This was one of my favorite action series back when it first aired, but it got much less compelling around series 8 and I quit watching at some point round there. I’ve now re-watched the entire series as well as the movie that followed it Spooks: The Greater Good. Here are some thoughts!
– I still LOVE the opening credits theme music!
– the first series aired in 2002, and all the computer and technical stuff is so primitive! LOL
– I much preferred the Grid in the first half of the series: it felt unique and distinctive. As the series progressed, somewhere after series 5 maybe, the Grid got very boring and it looks like a million other offices now.
– This was the first role I saw Rupert Penry-Jones in, and after this he was in The Strain where I was very happy with his performance as well.
– This was the second role I saw Matthew Macfadyen in, and had at first terrible trouble seeing him as a spy/action man. But I really became to like his character as the series went on, even though most of his personal storylines were bad.
– All in all, I think writing for characters was better in the early series. They all felt more like real people, each with their motives, strengths and weaknesses, desires and needs. Later on, the characters, with the exception of Sir Harry Pearce, became more one note and not as real feeling to me.
– I also liked that in the early series, the characters almost never had guns on them. Although often that felt unbelievable, though, but I’m not sure whether that’s because I’m used to all fictional spies/action heroes/law enforcers being armed to the teeth at all times. On the other hand, they never seemed to wear bulletproof vests even when knowingly going into a situation that likely would end in gunfire. Continue reading Random TV Thoughts – Spooks (MI-5 in the US)
SeaQuest DSV/2032 was a show I saw in the late 1990s. What I remember is 1) that it’s about the underwater adventures of a submarine and 2) has Stacy Haiduk (whom I had just seen playing a vampire in Kinded: The Embraced which was a tv series I was obsessed with for a bit back then) playing one of the supporting characters and 3) Stephanie Beacham playing the Doctor and 4) being profoundly disappointed that the good Doctor didn’t look (so, no big hair that screamed “RICH”, thousand dollar make-up, designer clothing and fur coats) or act anything like Sable Colby from The Colbys soap opera (also played by Stephanie Beacham) 🤣
I’ve now re-watched 6 out of the first 7 episodes (I quit the episode with the kids about 15 minutes in, it was so bad) and man, the stories are… not great. The plots are so simple, but worse than that, the writing is simplistic. There’s never a deeper thought anywhere to be found! It reminds me very much of Star Trek TNG but it’s missing all the nuance and deeper thoughts. There are so many interesting opportunities that the stories could explore a thing, or make a statement, or even consciously decide to not make a statement but the show doesn’t even notice them. There’s nothing here worth seeing the first time, never mind the second, as far as the stories and plots go.
The acting is okay, nothing great but nothing too awful either. They have some notable guest-stars (Roscoe Lee Browne, Yaphet Cotto etc.) and of course, Roy Scheider was a big star and plays the main character, the Captain of the SeaQuest. And there’s Ted Raimi, who will forever be Joxer from Xena to me. But I can’t remember whether I saw Xena or SeaQuest DSV first, so have no idea which character came first to me. Anyway, so far there’s almost no meat to any of the characters either – nothing new added since the pilot. Oh, and there’s the token kid/teenager who just happens to be a genius, of course, and whose parents dumped him to be SeaQuest’s problem, because apparently the only way to keep the kid in check is to trap him in a submarine underwater.
The interesting thing about the series is the setting: an advanced, huge submarine with minority military and majority scientists crew and which keeps order in the underwater world and investigates mysterious things or is sent to close stations down and find surprises on them. The setting is awesome! The seas are colonized and people are living in underwater stations. It makes me wish very much there’d be a show with the same setting but with much less simplistic story telling! The feel of the setting is the same I get from space adventures! I’m also very interested in the political system of the world, how that world differs from our current times – the hints the show gives say: considerably!
Everything seems to happen and be located in the moon pool room, with the Bridge being the other notable location. The Doctor, who says in the pilot that she’s a medical doctor and head of the sciences, also appears to be an expert in everything in addition to being a medical doctor. Often it would make sense to have another expert in an entirely different field to handle the explaining/thinking either she or the genius teenager is doing. The show does make a point of there being lots of scientists from lots of specialties being on board, after all! But no, it’s always the Doctor or the genius kid. And the science talk never sounds quite convincing – unlike in TNG, which somehow managed to make the invented science sound real and plausible.
I’m not sure whether the show is supposed to be for adults or children. All the main characters are adults, several of them middle aged and there’s only one kid. But the story telling is horribly simplistic, with nothing going on below the very surface level of the stories.
Another weird and interesting note is that the SeaQuest design, the boat itself, looks very much Minbari or Vorlon (from Babylon 5) to me! Both the shape and lines of the boat and its skin pattern. Every time SeaQuest the ship is shown, my brain automatically goes “that’s a Vorlon ship!” and then “oh wait – it’s not B5 i’m watching!” According to IMDB, SeaQuest DSV and Babylon 5 both started the year 1993. Oh, and the military crew jumpsuits are almost identical to what McQueen wears in Space: Above And Beyond.
I’m not sure I can keep watching – the stories are so simplistic, I don’t get anything out of them.
Series 3 is just as much brain candy as the previous seasons! I’m always surprised by how fun I find the show. I love the cheerful color palette and the ladies dresses and stately locales. Just so much fun!
Once again, the main story, the romance, was the most uninteresting bit to me. Most interesting stories in Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte for me have been those “relating to abusive households, forced/arranged marriage, pressures to do with financial ruin, trying to exist within oppressive gender roles that are crushing you” as someone put it. There’s just more meat in those stories than there have been in the romances.
I enjoyed the Bridgertons as a family very much again! I’d have loved to seen more of them as a family, but obviously as the main character was not a Bridgerton this time, that wasn’t possible.
Some random thoughts about series 3: Continue reading Bridgerton – Season 3 Thoughts