Tharmas
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My understanding is that the next season will be the last.
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What TV are you watching and how would you rate it? [Revive from FRDB]
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My understanding is that the next season will be the last.
Tharmas
Veteran Member
Let me add, I've been enjoying the series very much, even though I noticed a glaring plot hole in the episode before the last.
TSwizzle
I am unburdened by what has been.
Most of it is very good, I really like some of the characters, Lalo for example is fantastic and Tony Dalton has been exceptional in his portrayal. What a find he has been for the cast. But I have grown weary of Mike the very elderly "muscle" and Gus just doesn't seem as threatening as before.
But anyway, what was the glaring plot hole, nothing springs to mind.
Tharmas
Veteran Member
Two things:
1. Mike shows up in the desert to save Jimmy's ass. How does he know to be there?
2. Mike presumably drove his car into the desert. So what happened to it? Why do they end up having to walk out?
1. Mike shows up in the desert to save Jimmy's ass. How does he know to be there?
2. Mike presumably drove his car into the desert. So what happened to it? Why do they end up having to walk out?
TSwizzle
I am unburdened by what has been.
Hmm, well as far as Mike knowing about the pickup, I assumed he'd been keeping tabs on Saul or had been tipped off about it. It's pretty flimsy but yeah, how did Mike get to the desert.
So, I've been binge watching a couple of shows in the last month because of reasons here goes:
Star Trek: Picard
This is significantly better than Discovery. The show appears to realise that being part of a franchise means acknowledging the lore and continuity of previous shows. It then builds on it and shows a facet of Romulan society that hasn't been seen in other franchises and does the whole social commentary using sci fi as a metaphor that I'm fine with and we are all pretty used to.
Being better than Discovery doesn't automatically make it good. In fact it's still pretty terrible.
What HBO realises (usually, shut up) and Alex Kutzman doesn't is if you are only having ten episodes in a season, those episodes had better be tight, well polished episodes. Picard has absurdly long action scenes that don't really progress the plot that much, which means after every episode you are asking questions about what you just saw instead of what you just saw means for the characters. The majority of call back characters in the series are "one and dones" that come off as fan fiction instead of meaningful in any way. The crew of Picard's ship are more fleshed out than the ones in Discovery, but I still couldn't tell you who they are or what they're about. Compare that to the other Trek shows and after their first season you could give a quick blurb on who Chakotay or Garak or Scotty were and what they're all about. This goes back to a lot of the episodes being wasted on filler and unresolved plot lines (Tal Shiar have a Borg cube that they are sharing with the Federation. How and why?)
Basically, this show has Alex Kurtzman's fingerprints all over it. Every character must be simple one dimensional archetypes, pay the barest of lip service to what has come before, throw a couple of fucks in to sound edgy and adult and have a soundtrack that's hammers into the audience exactly how they are expected to feel with all the grace and subtlety of a 1950's John Wayne war movie. Hans Zimmer or Bear McCreary wouldn't go near this score with a fifty foot pole. This best I can say about it is that it isn't the Enterprise theme.
What pisses me off the most about the show is how lazy it feels. Star Trek has never been hard Sci-Fi, but its hand waving has been used to explain away issues like gravity in space teleportation etc. It has never openly butchered existing scientific consensus before and in one episode Riker asks Picard about "Newtons fourth law of thermodynamics". It's that level of stupid. But the piece de resistance is the final confrontation in the last episode. Remember in Deep Space Nine during the Dominion War the battles had a range of Federation, Romulan and Klingon Ships against a variety of Dominion ships?
Behold the wonders of copy and paste!
Give it a miss and wait of Axanar to come out instead. This show is pretty forgettable.
Star Trek: Picard
This is significantly better than Discovery. The show appears to realise that being part of a franchise means acknowledging the lore and continuity of previous shows. It then builds on it and shows a facet of Romulan society that hasn't been seen in other franchises and does the whole social commentary using sci fi as a metaphor that I'm fine with and we are all pretty used to.
Being better than Discovery doesn't automatically make it good. In fact it's still pretty terrible.
What HBO realises (usually, shut up) and Alex Kutzman doesn't is if you are only having ten episodes in a season, those episodes had better be tight, well polished episodes. Picard has absurdly long action scenes that don't really progress the plot that much, which means after every episode you are asking questions about what you just saw instead of what you just saw means for the characters. The majority of call back characters in the series are "one and dones" that come off as fan fiction instead of meaningful in any way. The crew of Picard's ship are more fleshed out than the ones in Discovery, but I still couldn't tell you who they are or what they're about. Compare that to the other Trek shows and after their first season you could give a quick blurb on who Chakotay or Garak or Scotty were and what they're all about. This goes back to a lot of the episodes being wasted on filler and unresolved plot lines (Tal Shiar have a Borg cube that they are sharing with the Federation. How and why?)
Basically, this show has Alex Kurtzman's fingerprints all over it. Every character must be simple one dimensional archetypes, pay the barest of lip service to what has come before, throw a couple of fucks in to sound edgy and adult and have a soundtrack that's hammers into the audience exactly how they are expected to feel with all the grace and subtlety of a 1950's John Wayne war movie. Hans Zimmer or Bear McCreary wouldn't go near this score with a fifty foot pole. This best I can say about it is that it isn't the Enterprise theme.
What pisses me off the most about the show is how lazy it feels. Star Trek has never been hard Sci-Fi, but its hand waving has been used to explain away issues like gravity in space teleportation etc. It has never openly butchered existing scientific consensus before and in one episode Riker asks Picard about "Newtons fourth law of thermodynamics". It's that level of stupid. But the piece de resistance is the final confrontation in the last episode. Remember in Deep Space Nine during the Dominion War the battles had a range of Federation, Romulan and Klingon Ships against a variety of Dominion ships?
Behold the wonders of copy and paste!
Give it a miss and wait of Axanar to come out instead. This show is pretty forgettable.
Second show, Daybreak
Post apocalyptic show about how adults have become zombies and teenagers are left to fend for themselves. Jeremiah meets 28 Days Later sprinkled with Zombieland basically. Completely unoriginal but still fun to watch. It came out in 2019 and yet some of the jokes come off as dated (the Emma Gonzales reference will probably go over everyone's head in a few years time) and yet it was still pretty enjoyable. The show doesn't try to be groundbreaking but what it does, it does well. I'm confused as fuck why Netflix cancelled it, it's still pretty watchable. Give it a go.
The Games (1998)
Last year, when human contact was a thing, I found out my flatmates did not know who John Clarke and Brian Dawe were. Aghast, I introduced them to the magic of youtube and the Genius that is Clarke and Dawe. A few weeks back I had to check on my parents to see if they were still breathing and do odd jobs for them (one is hemiplegic and the other has a back that can generously be described as fucked) and whilst mowing, vacuuming etc I found in the garage a box of DVDs, including season one and two of The Games. It's a comedy parodying the Sydney Organizing Committee for the 2000 Olympic Games. When I returned home, I felt like an apostle bringing the holy texts end converting the heathens. This is definitely one of my favourite shows and if you can find it, you won't be disappointed
RIP John Clarke, and thanks for your time.
Lastly, Avenue 5
Done by the same guy who did The Thick of It and Veep...eh, it's okay. There are moments where I laughed out loud but for some reason a comedy portraying an ignorant billionaire being in charge of a crisis and fucking everything up just isn't funny anymore. I think I would have liked the show better if it came out at around the same time as Red Dwarf or Black Adder but in the current climate I just found it hit and miss. Definitely not Armando Iannucci's best effort.
Post apocalyptic show about how adults have become zombies and teenagers are left to fend for themselves. Jeremiah meets 28 Days Later sprinkled with Zombieland basically. Completely unoriginal but still fun to watch. It came out in 2019 and yet some of the jokes come off as dated (the Emma Gonzales reference will probably go over everyone's head in a few years time) and yet it was still pretty enjoyable. The show doesn't try to be groundbreaking but what it does, it does well. I'm confused as fuck why Netflix cancelled it, it's still pretty watchable. Give it a go.
The Games (1998)
Last year, when human contact was a thing, I found out my flatmates did not know who John Clarke and Brian Dawe were. Aghast, I introduced them to the magic of youtube and the Genius that is Clarke and Dawe. A few weeks back I had to check on my parents to see if they were still breathing and do odd jobs for them (one is hemiplegic and the other has a back that can generously be described as fucked) and whilst mowing, vacuuming etc I found in the garage a box of DVDs, including season one and two of The Games. It's a comedy parodying the Sydney Organizing Committee for the 2000 Olympic Games. When I returned home, I felt like an apostle bringing the holy texts end converting the heathens. This is definitely one of my favourite shows and if you can find it, you won't be disappointed
RIP John Clarke, and thanks for your time.
Lastly, Avenue 5
Done by the same guy who did The Thick of It and Veep...eh, it's okay. There are moments where I laughed out loud but for some reason a comedy portraying an ignorant billionaire being in charge of a crisis and fucking everything up just isn't funny anymore. I think I would have liked the show better if it came out at around the same time as Red Dwarf or Black Adder but in the current climate I just found it hit and miss. Definitely not Armando Iannucci's best effort.
bilby
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The Games is truly one of the greatest comedies ever, but it's absolutely a reflection of its time, and unless you have an excellent memory for the details of the news in the run up to the Sydney olympics, many of the best lines and references will be lost on you.
When it was first broadcast, it included references to crazy things that had actually happened, but it also brilliantly predicted things that happened shortly after it aired - so sadly it will never be possible to fully experience the joy of watching art reflect reality reflecting art in quite the same way that we did watching Clarke, Dawe, and Riley satirising SOCOG in real time.
Nevertheless, it remains spectacularly good.
Ford
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Finally finished it. Pretty good stuff. Takes a few turns I didn't see coming. The cop (Darius) and the young survivor (Christa) have a relationship that develops in an interesting way. She is more than she seems, but then so is he. In fact that's a theme throughout the series. We're introduced to Virgil, a young man who has set up a youth center to help disaffected minors, and he has an interesting character arc, to put it mildly. Darius is a bit cliche'. A hard-nosed cop who doesn't know how to do anything else (he's been a cop for the maximum limit of 99 years) and he's got a wife who is fed up with his life, but still loves him. His rookie partner Lesky lets his inexperience get the best of him, but the consequences of his mistake play out in a (for me) very unexpected fashion which flips an already upside down story on it's head.
Oh, and there's a bit about jellyfish, and almost every car you see on screen is a white, electric Subaru. And Christa wears "mom jeans."
It's worth a watch.
[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfpCCl3cZU&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR3Lk0i5yMvCox81tf-I7QI5okMDVBhPqwWO4zl3quEIbdTUK6oVd4FEAVs[/YOUTUBE]
hyzer
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The Wire
I never watched this series during its original run. Now into the quarantine 8 weeks and my wife and I are now binge watching The Wire. She has seen it, and it is the one show that she said that she would never watch again. See, she lived in Baltimore for over 16 years. She worked for various Maryland Governors in the State's juvenile court system, met many of the actual persons portrayed or inspired characters including the reporters and heads of the police force and various city government types including Mayor O'Malley. She owned two different row houses in the city during that time, and had to deal with many of the issues in the show. Oddly, I went to junior high school with George Pelecanos, but I can't say that I knew him then. It is very interesting watch The Wire with my wife as she can tell me who each character is based on, and which events depicted actually happened. So I am grateful that she is willing to watch it again.
Rating 10/10.
I never watched this series during its original run. Now into the quarantine 8 weeks and my wife and I are now binge watching The Wire. She has seen it, and it is the one show that she said that she would never watch again. See, she lived in Baltimore for over 16 years. She worked for various Maryland Governors in the State's juvenile court system, met many of the actual persons portrayed or inspired characters including the reporters and heads of the police force and various city government types including Mayor O'Malley. She owned two different row houses in the city during that time, and had to deal with many of the issues in the show. Oddly, I went to junior high school with George Pelecanos, but I can't say that I knew him then. It is very interesting watch The Wire with my wife as she can tell me who each character is based on, and which events depicted actually happened. So I am grateful that she is willing to watch it again.
Rating 10/10.
Jimmy Higgins
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Yeouch! To think what they did to get Babylon 5, with their budget... and the technology in the late 90s. CBS is just bending ST fans over and spanking their asses... and charges them for it.
Jimmy Higgins
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If you haven't seen Homicide Life on the Street, I'd recommend that. Same creator, and Season One is about as good as TV can possibly get.
hurtinbuckaroo
Contributor
Homicide is definitely worth a re-watch. It's on the schedule after we finish The Wire.
We're also watching a few NFL games, now that they've offered "Game Pass" to everyone for free until the end of May. Every game from 2009-2019 is available, commercial-free. You can also select a reply that cuts out the time between plays, but for me, that interferes with the flow. No credit card registration required to sign up, so this isn't one of those "we hope you'll forget about your subscription when we start charging you" ploy.
TSwizzle
I am unburdened by what has been.
Darn it, wrong thread.
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Coupled with the fact that they were able to churn out over twenty episodes a year - and at least two-thirds of them were really, really good. It's a complete mystery to me why people think anyone from the "Bad Robot posse" are talented.
Ford
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I haven't seen anything beyond the first episode of Picard, because at this point CBS All Access has not proven to me it's worth 7 dollars a month. So I can't really speak to your criticisms except to say "Newton's fourth law of thermodynamics"? Seriously?
If you have the Amazon Prime and want a show that has tight (first season excepted), polished episodes that feature characters with depth AND a respect for hard science, check out The Expanse. The first 3 seasons were on SyFy (which usually puts out crap series) and the 4th was produced by Amazon after it got dropped. It's not perfect, but IMO it might be the best science fiction series since the Battlestar Galactica reboot.
Oh, and if you're waiting for Axanar to come out, don't hold your breath, because you'll be holding it for a very long time. Alec Peters' little con job managed to do serious damage to the Trek fan film universe. For awhile, CBS/Paramount looked the other way while fans produced increasingly elaborate films and series (Star Trek Continues was a standout, for example) so long as they played in the sandbox and didn't try to make money. Peters used the Axanar trailer and teaser (which looked promising) to raise money from fans, and then turned around and used that money to build a for-profit studio which he planned on renting out to other productions.
Big mistake.
As a result, lawyers got involved, and CBS/Paramount has lots more on deck than an independent filmmaker. It didn't help that Peters spent time bragging about how his project was going to supplant the official product. The long and short of it is that Axanar will probably never be made, and his arrogance caused many other dedicated fan productions to be shut down or scaled back.
(full disclosure: I worked for CBS at the time this went down, and formerly worked for Viacom, which owns Paramount...though I was nowhere near the TV or movie parts of the respective companies)
Yep. Riker makes a cameo later in the season and asks Picard "What is Newton's fourth law of thermodynamics", to which Picard responds with, "No good deed goes unpunished"
Me and my flatmates looked at one another in absolute confusion, untill one of them asked, "Hang on, isn't that a Ferengi rule of aquisition?" So we paused the episode as it's been a while since any of us have seen TNG and...nope. Not an insider joke on a holosuite episode. The writers of Picard genuinely believe Isaac Newton discovered the "Four Laws of Thermodynamics"
It's Amazon Prime that shows Picard in Australia, beltalowder. Sa sa ke? And I'm up to speed on the books, they are also fantastic.
I did not know that. Thanks for the background. However, Alec Peters is saying something different on the Axanar page so who knows. I wouldn't be comfortable betting against a legion of corporate lawyers however.
hurtinbuckaroo
Contributor
Maybe I'm misreading something, but how is that not just an attempt at humor?
It probably was and it was still badly executed. Here's a clip, the conversation is at the 2 minute mark.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2hI6fdkZU8[/youtube]