After seeing a couple of reviews of the second season of Disenchantment (Matt Groening's Netflix fantasy show, in case you've forgotten) talking about how good the first season was, I've gone back over the last few days to revisit it and I think it was premature to give up on it when I did.
Towards the end of the series, it embraces a more serialized form of storytelling, and while some of the problems with the show stick around – inconsistent character interactions and the relative sparseness of punchlines – it actually gets pretty good by the time the first season wraps up.
This is an obvious development in retrospect – a fantasy-influenced show needs to tell a long-form story; you can't parody huge sprawling epics without going for a little bit of scale yourself. It's kind of a shame it started off with the Futurama-style episodic format, spinning its wheels for too long setting up characters and politics but sacrificing clarity and consistency for gags which often felt a little cheap.
Maybe, being on Netflix, they figured most viewers would binge the whole thing and get past those rough early episodes – maybe most people did?
Anyway, if you dropped Disenchantment partway through, it's worth picking it up again. Tempered expectations helped me get through the first series, and now I'm quite looking forward to starting the second.
I though it was so terrible I can't even face trying it again.
Well The Boys has one hell of an opening episode. Watching the rest of this for certain.
What the hell is Beard Guy's accent all about though? Please don't tell me he's meant to be British.
It's an amazingly poor Dick van Dyke effort. It remains terrible, but charming.
And note to everyone else not watching The Boys. Watch The Boys. k thx bai
I read the comic for about ten issues and I'd rather trim my toenails with a fucking hatchet than watch the boys
Also, what the hell is up with the Amazon Prime app, it’s terrible. You’d think that having watched several episodes of the same show over a couple of nights, it might appear on the front page for ease of viewing, but no, it decided that what I really wanted to watch was Mr Bean and completely removed the show I’d actually been watching from any of the panels on display. Had to go and search for it again to find it, whereupon it decided that I clearly didn’t like the 4K version I’d been watching up to that point and would only give me the regular HD version (for some reason they’re different on Amazon). Had to log in and out of the app repeatedly (which changes your recommendations each time) before it miraculously reappeared.
I keep pressing the button to resume the episode I was watching, and then it restarts the season instead. 😕
Anyone watched El Camino yet?
It's not up there with the best of Breaking Bad (what is?) but it's an excellent way to spend a couple of hours.
It feels a little pointless in a way, and the pacing is at times… not bad, exactly, but surprising? Minor quibbles (including the aforementioned) aside, it's generally of a very high standard across the board though, suitably tense and well acted (RIP Robert Forster), and I thought it was great.
First episode of His Dark Materials was good. It had a minor amount of British Telly Jank, but seems to be doing the book justice.
Also fuck that monkey.
I enjoyed it a lot, and McAvoy's Asriel delivered an infinitely more charismatic version of that speech in the retiring room than I ever managed to imagine reading the book.
Overall, the casting is excellent, and the only complaint I really have is that there are too many people conspicuously unaccompanied by daemons in the background of crowd shots; though I couldn't tell you for the life of me what Ma Costa's was, either, which is pretty damning considering the amount of screen time she had.
I don't remember her daemon getting much coverage in the book either, to be fair.
That's true, but I don't remember even seeing it here. Given Spoiler - click to show how horrifying it is to Lyra later, when she comes across a child on the North without a daemon, it seems odd to have so many people who don't obviously have one nearby, though it's almost certainly a budgetary restriction.
Yeah I'm willing to overlook the lack of daemons. In The Secret Commonwealth
Spoiler - click to showLyra manages to walk around town without Pan; so many people have small 'pocket daemons' that no-one looks twice at her.
It's clearly budgetary, but I don't think it breaks the story. They're actually respecting the religion stuff this time around, which is much more important.
Yeah, for sure. I've not read The Secret Commonwealth yet, but it's top of my wishlist.
It's been long enough since I read the books that I can't remember anything at all about them really, so this is basically new to me. I thought last night's episode was outstanding.
It was bloody fantastic wasn't it.
Also fuck that monkey.
The attack on Pan by the monkey felt as horrific as it did in the book. Though again they haven't really explained in the show what a taboo it is to touch another persons daemon.
And for those who haven't read the book/forgot - the whole crossing in to our dimension is not mentioned at all in the first book. Chronologically it does happen at this time, but its not until the second book its revealed. Maybe this means an early Will appearance?
Maybe this means an early Will appearance?
That would be a good change to make. Book 1's structure wasn't great.
I remember that being my main issue with the books - that so much stuff was held back till later, it felt like he had made them up as he'd gone along. I'm sure he probably didn't, but introducing characters earlier (as I believe they are already doing) will make the whole thing feel much more coherent.
They cast Will already, so he's definitely going to show up sooner than series 2. And he's in the intro.
Though again they haven't really explained in the show what a taboo it is to touch another persons daemon.
It definitely makes the bit with the journalist in the car much worse…
There is a hell of a lot riding on Will being cast well.
The third season of The Dragon Prince, Netflix's 3D CGI fantasy adventure from the lead writers of Avatar: The Last Airbender, has its third season land today. I'm a huge fan of this show, and finished a rewatch of the first two seasons last night too prepare for this one.
It's mostly brilliant, though there are a couple of plot threads that seem unnecessary (plus one that I expected to return but hasn't… yet), characters who have a big intro but turn out to not actually be a big deal, and an ending that seems 99% sure they aren't getting a fourth season but throws in one last cliffhanger just in case.
The animation has gotten much smoother since the early episodes – though it's still animated on the twos, so isn't as fluid as you might expect from computer animation.
(Aunt Amaya is still the best character, don't @ me.)
I've been watching both The Mandalorian and Watchmen. I'm not sure there's much point in saying anything about either other than they're brilliant. As far as I'm concerned neither has had a bad episode so far. Watchmen in particular is initially bewildering but the further it goes the more satisfying it seems to become.
I really want to watch The Mandalorian, and have already had that bit spoiled for me by every press outlet in the world. Stupid delay.
His Dark Materials just keeps getting better and better. They've even managed to improve Mrs Coulter over the books, with the (very, very slightly) sympathetic Golden Monkey. You can really see how much she tortures herself.
Has anyone watched Dark on Netflix? It was getting a lot of buzz so I've watched the first couple of episodes – it's definitely intriguing. Mystery/Drama/Thriller/Sci-fi/Stranger-Things-But-Darker. Although it's making me suspect I've got face blindness. It's very difficult keeping track of who's who.
The Mandalorian is strange. By turns cheap looking, then nice. Tonally all over the place. Predictable but occasionally surprising. I thought the first ep was really dull but it has improved gradually over the run so far. I think if you take it for what it is (and I'm not even sure what that is to be honest) it's OK. Ish. Maybe.
His Dark Materials just keeps getting better and better. They've even managed to improve Mrs Coulter over the books, with the (very, very slightly) sympathetic Golden Monkey. You can really see how much she tortures herself.
I don't know if you've been watching the new David Attenborough show Seven Worlds One Planet but they had a whole sequence in one of the recent episodes about these monkeys and I was immediately KILL THEM, KILL THEM ALL. Kept hoping they'd get eaten by a leopard or something.
I think if you take it for what it is (and I'm not even sure what that is to be honest) it's OK. Ish. Maybe.
I've a friend who's watching it and is a heavy Star Wars lore hound. She was blown away by the first ep but had a specific problem with the 2nd – to do with a mammal laying an egg…
I went in with pretty much zero expectation or hopes and have just been pleasantly surprised how enjoyable the whole thing is.
She … had a specific problem with the 2nd [episode] – to do with a mammal laying an egg…
The platypus says hello (as do four species of echidna).
Mammals that lay eggs are called monotremes – rare, but not unheard of.
I think the egg is not the most problematic bit of that episode.
I watched The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, which is absolutely spectacular to look at but as tonally confused as you’d expect from a 50/50 mix of Game of Thrones and Fraggle Rock. Far darker and more disturbing than its PG certificate would lead you to expect but a bit too dependent on visions and prophecies (always the laziest form of fantasy writing) to move its plot along. Still, the Skeksis are fantastic villains and all the voice actors are clearly having a whale of a time. I’m looking forward to watching the Making Of documentary perhaps more than I was to seeing the last few episodes.
His Dark Materials continues to impress, though we're past the most of the parts of the book that I really remember with any clarity now. I am so, so impressed with the cast generally, but Ruth Wilson in particular is amazing. Everything about her Mrs. Counter is incredible, and the speech about why she's doing what she's doing in the latest episode is chilling and heartbreaking in about equal measure, and really hammers home the self-loathing mistreatment of her daemon. Also, the way she moves, especially when angry, which is just incredible.
Roll on Spoiler - click to showBEARMAGEDDON
The one complaint I've got about His Dark Materials is how little it's done to explain the human/daemon bond properly. Though I'm also kind of at a loss for how you'd do that without a bunch of characters standing around having expository conversations about things they all already know…
And is it just my poor memory, or were the books much more up front about calling it the Church rather than the "Magisterium"? Some of the iconography in the show is reminiscent of the Catholic church (albeit with more modern design sensibilities), but it's conspicuously shying away from using the terminology.
That all seems pretty consistent with the book as I remember it.
My memory is of the books being about as oblique as the show on what daemons actually were; and as far as the church stuff goes, they're still all cardinals and priests talking about sin and "experimental theology", which I'm sure was the terminology from the book.
The one complaint I've got about His Dark Materials is how little it's done to explain the human/daemon bond properly. Though I'm also kind of at a loss for how you'd do that without a bunch of characters standing around having expository conversations about things they all already know…
Yep. As someone who can't remember the books, I'm finding it occasionally a bit obscure why things happen the way they do. I was convinced for a while that people couldn't hear anybody's else's daemons talking, but there was a clear shot in the last episode where they could. And I'm not sure why one of the guards picking up Pan caused Lyra to immediately collapse. How far can humans get from their daemons? What happens if one accidentally gets locked in the house? I assume humans die if their daemons do, which seems like a bit of a drawback if you've got a rabbit or a stick insect or something. Does anyone have a worm for a daemon and if so how often do they get accidentally stepped on? There must be a clear social hierarchy between those that have got big, impressive monkeys and ocelots and so on, and those who've got rubbish animals. If your kid grows up and ends up with a viper, can you disown him on the basis he's clearly a wrong'un?
So far the only real criticism I have is that the lack of daemons on screen (clearly and understandably for budgetary reasons) does directly impact the storytelling. The whole Billy Costa sequence was completely undermined:
Spoiler - click to show"He hasn't got a daemon? Why hasn't he got a daemon?" Jeez, I dunno, maybe he's just out of shot like absolutely everybody else's.
Likewise with the nurse in the last episode where I genuinely didn't realise she didn't have a daemon until it was explicitly pointed out, simply because hardly anyone else is ever shown with theirs either.
But it's still fantastic.
My memory is of the books being about as oblique as the show on what daemons actually were
The show has actually been a bit more obvious about the daemons-as-souls thing (the opening text in the first episode literally spells it out), but it's not the metaphysical stuff that's missing so much as the psychology of having one of these things.
The closeness between Pan and Lyra in the books is just… absent from the show. It doesn't do a great job of communicating that Pan and Lyra (or Lee and Hester, or Mrs. Coulter and That F–king Monkey) are a single being.
There is a radio dramatisation which is well worth hunting down. I preferred it to the books in places.
The Witcher is out on Netflix; I've only seen one episode so far, and it's very grey.
Seems to be going hard for the Game of Thrones crowd, but I feel like it's rushed into things. There are only two plot threads, but they're both so dense with expository nonsense – about places, people and events that we have no context for – that it's tough to follow why a lot of things are happening because there's no sense of what bits are actually important. There's a lot of talk of prophecies and destiny and the like, but there's no sense of how seriously they should be taken in this world. Two armies go to war, but I didn't get any sense of who either side was, or why they were fighting.
Cavill is fine, though I find his chin a bit distracting, and it's hard to tell if Geralt's stiffness is a character trait or poor direction. He gets a pretty good if very videogame-y swordfight towards the end of the episode, but spends most of the runtime growling at people and looking intense.
It makes what I consider a pretty major miss-step by opening with an overdramatic, overlong fight against a laughable CGI monster in a laughable CGI forest, instead of having Geralt just show up with this thing on the back of his horse to scare the locals.
I'm hoping that the characters get more, well, character in future episodes, and that it gets to build up some momentum. This introduction was very prologue-y.
We're two episodes in, and I'm really enjoying it so far. There's a lot of name-dropping stuff, but as near as I can tell, a lot of it's just texture.
Two armies go to war, but I didn't get any sense of who either side was, or why they were fighting.
Cintra (the lions) are being attacked by Nilfgaard (the sun). Nilfgaard are kind of expansionist jerks generally, but the queen of Cintra does also specifically say Spoiler - click to show they're after Ciri, though not why (yet) - it will come up, though.
Cavill is fine, though I find his chin a bit distracting, and it's hard to tell if Geralt's stiffness is a character trait or poor direction.
The chin is occasionally an issue, but the performance is perfect. Witchers undergo a lot of shit to become Witchers, and one of the side effects is a famously-repressed emotional response. I'm pretty sure someone mentions it in passing.
Episode 2 is a lot less grey, and introduces another couple of major characters, one of whom I like a lot.
EDIT: The one thing I do think it does quite poorly is establishing the geography of the world; it jumps around a lot with no real indication of how far apart any of these places are.
It's OK so far. My only issue is that it's a little Maid Marian and Her Merry Men in bits, and GoT pretty much absorbed every jobbing British actor so we're clearly dealing with the dregs of what's left. The King and Queen were cardboard sets and BBC Doctor Who circa 1978 quality.
Any thoughts on The Doctor yesterday? I thought it was a solid 7 out of 10 but the internet seemed to be losing their shit over how good they thought it was.
It still winds me up how often this Doctor says “I don’t know” (five times last episode). All the previous Doctors have always, whether they revealed it or not, been one step ahead of the baddies. This one never seems to be.
I thought it was a decent episode with a fantastic reveal. We’ll see where it goes from here but it needs a bit of energy and life injected into it after the last series, and this was a good start.
We finishedThe Witcher last night, which got much better as it went along. Cavill's hair and chin varied wildly in their level of distraction, and a couple of the CGI–heavy scenes were fairly ropey, but it looks like this first season has done a lot of the heavy lifting for world building and backstory, so I'm interested to see where the already-commissioned second takes things.
I'm especially intrigued to see how the shift to a more linear narrative affects things…
I almost gave up on The Witcher after the first two episodes, but episode 3 was fantastic. Glad I stuck with it.
What makes the show great is clearly what makes the games great – Geralt methodically hunting a unique, inventive monster.
We watched The Witcher episode… 6? last night. It's the one with the Spoiler - click to show dragon hunt and I thought it was the weakest of the series by far. The creature design was hideous, the supporting characters were caricatures of archetypes, the "twist" was telegraphed a mile off, and it just didn't feel like it went anywhere.
It also doesn't help that a bunch of Yen/Geralt stuff apparently happened offscreen between episodes, so they suddenly seemed to be in a very different place, relationship-wise.
Haven't seen Who yet, but it's on the list.
Inadvertently finished The Witcher, having been under the mistaken impression that there were 10 episodes when there are, in fact, 8.
Other than the aforementioned episode, it's generally a marvelous bit of TV, though the unclear timeframes and geography are initially very "…huh?"-inducing. I ended up just about getting to grips with the chronology, but had to Google a map of the Continent just so I had some idea where anything was relative to anything else.
Well, after a pretty decent two-parter I see Doctor Who has absolutely blown it with the third episode, which I think might actually be the worst one I've ever watched. I mean I know that it being a bit up and down from week to week is part of its charm, but this was catastrophically bad. What on earth is going on with this show?
I care less and less with each season. I think my kids do too.
