OK, I know I haven’t posted much in a while, but life got a bit busy. I haven’t been to the movies since the new Black Panther, and I had a lot going on of late. Hey, I got a ton of papers to grade this weekend, so I’m not 100% sure I’ll be able to get out to see anything this weekend either. Plus, I used to do TV reviews from time to time, but I fell behind on those. I partially blame the fact there were a lot of shows I liked that all seemed to come out either on Thursdays or aired on a Wednesday night when I wasn’t able to watch and I had to catch up on Thursdays. Anyhoo, here are some quick reviews for a few of the shows I’ve seen recently now that all of them are finished for the year.
Oh, I used to do book reviews here too. No idea when those are coming back. Maybe sometime after the podcast returns.
House of the Dragon season one
Anyone who thought HBO might have left well enough alone and not gone back to one of its biggest hits ever has apparently never paid attention to how entertainment companies work. The network was planning multiple Game of Thrones spin-offs, and they finally got one to air with House of the Dragon, a series set centuries before the events of the previous show, telling the story of a civil war between different branches of the royal Targaryen family that decimated their dragons. Season one was all set-up, basically explaining how childhood friends Princess Rhaenyra (Milly Alcock as a teen, Emma D”Arcy as an adult) and Queen Alicent (Emily Carey as a teen, Olivia Cooke as an adult) ended up on opposing sides in a civil war.
House of the Dragon basically acted as a season long slow burn, but it more or less had to, depicting as it does the slow descent from friendship to the most dire of enemies, all while a well-meaning but tortured king (an awesome Paddy Considine) fights to make sure the kingdom stays whole despite the best efforts of various individuals throughout the kingdom. There aren’t really any bad performances (bad wigs may be another story), but Considine especially shines. I wasn’t overly enamored by the series’s frequent season one time jumps, particularly since I couldn’t quite figure out who many of these people were, but also because it meant Alcock and Carey were gone too soon. That said, the producers seem to have learned a few lessons about how the previous series ended, and I do find it a little weird when I think about it how Matt Smith went from one of the more childlike incarnations of Doctor Who to the go-to guy for psychopaths.
Grade: A-
Andor season one
Was anyone asking for a Disney+ series about Rebel Alliance spy Cassian Andor (Diego Luna)? Of the various doomed characters in the Rogue One movie, he might have been one of the blander ones. That said, I felt that movie had some potential when I saw it for showing the potential shades of gray in Star Wars morality when Andor shot an informant in the back. But was it enough to give the guy his own show?
Turns out it does, and it’s what I was hoping Rogue One was going to be before the more standard Star Wars adventure story started. Essentially, this show is the story not just of how Andor got to be the Rebel’s best spy, but also the formation of the Rebel Alliance as a whole while also showing how the banality of evil that is Imperial bureaucrats and how they grind ordinary people under its feet. Andor at first, for this first season (a second had already been promised), is not so much interested in being a rebel so much as he is to maybe finding his lost sister and avoiding prison time for crimes he’s committed while looking for said sister. Along the way, he gets involved in a payroll robbery, goes to jail for unrelated crimes, and eventually returns home for the most personal of reasons. Meanwhile, agents of the Empire actually react like human beings sometimes, Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O”Reilly) works to fund the Rebels on the sly, and Stellan Skarsgard’s Luthen Rael seems to be working to make the various disparate cells into an actual Alliance. It’s a slowly paced show, one that focuses on characters and may actually be the mature Star Wars story I’ve been waiting for, one without too many ties to the original movies for a change that can really explore what it means to live in that universe. More of this would be appreciated.
Grade: A
Archer season 13
OK, so…Archer is basically the show it always is. Sterling Archer is a spy for an independent spy agency, an immature asshole who slings insults that are both incredibly immature and intellectually impressive. He’s surrounded by colleagues who are somehow both incompetent and usually able to get the job done (eventually). Whatever other plot is going on, it’s basically just in the background for fans to just hang out with these misfits for about a half hour at a time. Sure, there was a season long plot involving an outside corporation taking over the agency that once shared a name with a real world organization that this workplace comedy probably doesn’t want to remind people exists, but does anyone tune in for that sort of thing? If anything, the one thing missing is Archer’s mother Mallory, though for a good reason since actress Jessica Walter passed away, and the series did give the character a nice send-off last season.
Basically, I enjoy Archer about the same as I always do. It’s consistently fun, I’ll watch it every time new episodes come out, but I wouldn’t quite call it the best TV animation has to offer.
Grade: B
Star Trek: Lower Decks season three
If you had told me that my favorite Star Trek among the various new series would be an animated comedy that pays tribute to pretty much every previous incarnation of the series, I probably wouldn’t have believed it. Then again, I haven’t seen much of Discovery or any of Brave New Worlds. Regardless, Lower Decks tells the often funny story about a handful of crewmembers of a second class Starfleet ship. There’s ambitious but perpetually nervous Boimler, engineering nerd Rutherford, rule breaker (and the captain’s daughter) Mariner, and the kindhearted Tendi running around and having adventures away from the bridge crew who have the sort of adventures that make Star Trek what it is in any incarnation.
It helps that the creative team behind the series are clearly fans of all things Trek, and I do mean all things. The characters are all vividly created and interesting, but they interact in a world where godlike aliens appear all the time, rogue archaeologists seem to have all the fun, and admirals are never up to any good. But this is a show where Mariner will get it into her head to do something to save her mother, on trial for a crime she didn’t commit, only to find out that more competent and recognizable Trek characters took care of it off-screen. This is a show where a trip to Deep Space Nine will feature a few trips around the pylons like that series’s opening credits plus guest voicework by Nana Visitor and Armin Shimmerman. It’s a show that will do a whole episode that seems to include a tribute to most if not all of the big screen Star Trek adventures. It’s basically a lot like Archer except the characters are far more vivid and seem to actually grow as people.
That said, there was one uncharacteristically bad episode, one that focused on a minor character from a previous season, the Exo-comp officer Ensign Peanut Hamper, and she was more obnoxious than funny.
Grade: B+
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law season one
Well, this show seemed to be a controversial one despite the fact it probably shouldn’t have been. Anyone even remotely familiar with the She-Hulk character should know her best runs were often comedic in nature, so putting her into a lighthearted legal comedy was just the right move. Oh, and I’ve been hoping actress Tatiana Maslany would get something more high profile since I first saw her on Orphan Black. She brings the right charm to a character that routinely breaks the fourth wall while dealing with her own feelings of social awkwardness. Yeah, the show brought out the expected and unexpected MCU cameos, most notably Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner and Charlie Cox’s Daredevil, but personally, I may be a sucker for the Sorcerer Supreme Wong, if for no other reason than it seems to confirm that Benedict Wong is becoming the new MVP of the MCU. Oh, and his new friend Madisynn may be the sort of scene stealer that will probably be the litmus test for viewers. Like Madisynn? You’ll probably dig She-Hulk‘s sense of humor. Dislike her? This show isn’t for you.
That said, it did seem odd that Jameela Jamil’s Titania, set up as the villain, was barely a factor in the show. Then again, the real villains were a bunch of internet trolls who got their jollies bashing a female hero, showing if nothing else, the creators realized what was going to happen online the minute this show hit streaming and opted to comment on that directly.
Grade: B+
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