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TV Tuesdays Free Talk
Have you watched any TV shows recently you want to discuss? Any shows you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.
Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.
Every time I see Michael Jordan mentioned I can't help but be reminded of Chamillionaire's story of encountering him at a party.
Snowfl.com shows some sites that have it with sub-titles.
I watched Patton Oswalt's most recent stand-up special (I Love Everything!) on Netflix. It made my spouse and I laugh, so I guess I'd say it's pretty good!
I watched most of it. Didn’t like it very much. Could see the punchlines a mile away.
I've finished Devs and apart from the somewhat fumbled ending it was great. I'm not too sure about how hard-sciency the show is, but the concepts show is exploring are fascinating. I've definitely spent some hours on Wikipedia reading up on the topic of quantum mechanics and determinism.
I'm also happy that it's a "mini-serie", they've managed to tell the whole story in 9 episodes and not end it on a stupid cliffhanger, since there's not going to be a second season.
I watched one thing that I love, and a bunch of stuff which is just meh.
The Great is brilliant. Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult fizz their way through this. There's a great cast, with sensible choice to use a wide range of actors. Even the small parts have great actors (James Smith for Count Gorky, Miles Jupp for Maxim the Painter). Genuinely funny. Hoult is playing a monster, but he manages to humanise him a bit. I recommend this.
I watched Love and Robots. I really like the fact that there's a big outlet for SF short fiction; and also for varied animation. I didn't so much enjoy the gratuitous sex and gore -- this is a sign of laziness. And the selection felt weirdly limited. There's so much great SF short fiction and they picked a pretty narrow range. I hope there's another season, and that they get a wider range.
I watched Altered Carbon. I read the books when they came out and have forgotten almost everything in them, but I thought the books made a lot more of the re-sleeving. Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention when watching, or maybe I'm misremembering something else (Greg Egan?). I was looking forward to this, but it wasn't great.
Defending Jacob is a lot more tedious than it thinks it is.
I’m watching Deep Space Nine for the first time. On episode 11. What a wonderful, groundbreaking show.
OdorOdo is my favorite character – he’s strong, harsh, cunning and fair. The world for him is black and white, and he always expect the worse from people. The best person to have as an ally, and the worst possible enemy.Odo. Odor is a bad smell. :P
And yeah, DS9 is one of my favorites. My personal favorite characters are Quark and Rom though. For Ferengi they ain't half bad! Garak is pretty interesting too, IMO. I don't want to spoil anything though, so will instead just say that you have some great episodes ahead of you! :)
p.s. If you like DS9 you might also enjoy Babylon 5 as well. It is much more low budget and dated (esp the CGI), and has some serious pacing issues, but I found the characters and political intrigue in B5 to be even more compelling than those in DS9.
Just one question because this is making me anxious: how’s Worf in DS9? Do they use him well?
To be honest, I am probably not the best person to ask that, since (even though admitting this may get me disowned by my other Trekkie friends) I have never actually been all that big a fan of Worf's character, even in TNG. And the Klingons in general are amongst my least favorite alien races in the show, since the whole "warrior culture" trope has been done to death at this point, and I don't find it particularly interesting or compelling.
I largely agree, but I find the subject of honor, and other expressions of deontological ethics, extremely interesting.
I do too, which is why I love history/non-fiction (and even some fiction) focused on Fuedal Japan so much... but sadly the scifi take on those concepts is rarely very nuanced. Even in TNG the Klingons behaved rather stereotypically and often cartoonishly, and were treated as pretty one dimensional. Worf has a bit more dimension to him because of being raised by humans, but I still don't find the stories exploring his struggles grappling with that particularly interesting. It probably also doesn't help that I really disliked all the episodes involving Alexander, his son, in TNG too... though thankfully they mostly did away with that character in DS9.
There are lots to like (and dislike) about Worf. On the plus side, Michael Dorn is a wonderful performer that gives credibility even to the more contrived plotlines. I believe the character is well conceived because it has nuance and inner conflict, but the whole warrior Klingon culture is problematic. I don’t have an issue with a lack of originality, but it’s simply not credible for a culture/empire to remain cohesive with such level of constant and uniform aggression. Soldiers are hyper aggressive to the enemy, but a war effort would be doomed to failure if they directed the same hostility to their peers. Klingons in TNG probably slap their mothers from inside their bellies, punches waves at the ocean and eat nails for breakfast.
Oh yeah, nothing against Michael Dorn, who did the best he could with what he was given, and is by all accounts a lovely human being. :) 100% agree with the rest of your comment too.
I started -hesitantly- on Snowpiercer.
I'm not too familiar with Daveed Diggs, but he has that 'TV-face' that made me fear the worst. Meaning that it could well have been on any low-rating Starz or AMC show. That guys face looks like it could be cast in pretty much any generic TV-show. If you copypaste him in his Snowpiercer outfit into a The Walking Dead episode, nobody would even notice.
But then there's Jennifer Connelly. Now there's a reason to watch the pilot. So I did.
And I was pleasantly surprised. Nothing earth-shattering, nothing new or exhilarating. But a nice show nonetheless. I liked Boons movie, but I felt the 90 minute movie format did the story wrong. This show seems to stick a bit more to the comics, and maybe it can deliver. But after two episodes, it's still not there.
Every single time the story does go on a sidetrack (and this happens way too much), my mind wanders off to he whole concept of a train that never stops. And what The Last Ark of Humanity would contain. And how you get to engineer an ever-running 1001 wagons-long train/biome that apparently runs on batteries.
Now that's an alien enough concept which easily makes for the most entertaining part of the show. Sadly enough, it's up to the concept to carry the show, although Connelly does try.