DaveSumm

Finally got round to watching this. I was hooked to begin with, there’s something so addictive about it and I was reading these threads after each episode (keeping careful track of airdates so as not to spoil things, like I’ve had to do since time immemorial ) … and now I’m here and caught up, actually, I think it might be a bit shit? I was so glad to see people saying they had no idea if it was great or garbage. I guess Season 2 wasn’t as good as 1, but actually I don’t know that I could really point to what it was about the first season that was more accomplished. I think the premise gives it this false momentum, this driving mystery of ‘ooo how did things get this bad? What else happened?’ which made season 1 feel like something great was building. But was it? In another universe, there could be fantastic show about how a cliquey group of high school girls, combined with a severe case of violent sleep walking, and an unmedicated mental health issue all snowball into almost accidentally forming a cannibalistic cult. Nothing supernatural, just a look at how people could latch onto ideas to survive. But this show? Well, in episode 8 Taissa said ‘OK we need to survive’, and then apparently off camera, they concocted a plan to randomly consign someone to death? And then chase them with weapons with looks of murderous rage? That was part of the mystery to begin with, and it turns out the answer is that they just … decided that one day. OK. And once the veneer dropped, I started noticing other holes. The present day plot does nothing but spend two seasons getting them to some more woods. The music, while they’ve got some great songs, isn’t very skilfully edited into the show. It’s tonally all over the place. The writing varies from average to poor. The plot contrivances are sloppy, almost never character driven. I’d say Christina Ricci and Melanie Lynskey are doing a huge majority of the heavy lifting for the show. If someone wants to make a black comedy with those two and Elijah Wood, sign me the fuck up. But they forgot to tell any of the other cast that that’s the show they’re making. So it’s not quite good enough as a comedy, nor as a character study, or a survival show, or a Lost style mystery. If they want to make three more seasons, they really need to decide what it is they’re making. Anyway, my prediction is, they’ll invert the premise at some point. The adults all get this wilderness bug that Charlotte has and head back, the kids get rescued, so they all switch places.

You can’t just list all the shit films though. Their success is related to their quality. Guardians 3 and Spider-Verse should be the end of this argument, they were both recent successes.

I think I remember people talking about superhero fatigue when Amazing Spider-Man was announced. That was 13 years ago. Wasn’t true then, isn’t true now. We don’t need anymore reasons for Flash to flop: 1) Miller is apparently a piece of shit, 2) DC couldn’t market it properly because of 1), 3) DCEU movies have been staggeringly bad since forever, 4) the CGI is truly terrible in places and 5) this movie isn’t that good. I wonder how it would’ve done if Gunn hadn’t announced that it would ‘reboot’ the DC universe? That’s the only reason I saw it opening weekend, and it’s the first thing I was asked here afterwards.

The difference here is, everything ENT and before didn’t change the aesthetic. However different the NX-01 and the 1701 and the D looked, the idea was that that they all actually looked like that. By the time Trials and Tribbilations came around, we’d already seen Scotty make a holographic bridge of the original Enterprise on TNG. It just couldn’t work for Pike to visit that bridge, they’ve retconned the look too much.

I don’t think that’s correct. TOS is 2266 when it starts. The Cage is 13 years before that, 2253. Discovery Season 1 is 10 years before TOS, 2256. Pike joins Discovery in 2257, hangs out for a year, goes back to Enterprise in 2258, then hangs out while Disco has its third season. So SNW Season 1 is 2259. If three years had past it’d be 2262, only four years before TOS. @Corvinus85 Possibly you’re thinking of how long ago he found out he was going to be in the accident? That could’ve been 3 years ago in SNW Season 1, but that happened in Disco S2.

Completed maybe, but this has been heavily tinkered with. Reading some of the ‘leaks’ before it released and comparing them to the finished product, there’s all kinds of ‘this scene was supposed to be X but they changed their minds’.

I think 1, 3 and 4 are Cosmere, 2 isn’t.

@Myrddin

Oh, and the CGI look decent enough for the action scenes but then looks god awful when they do a human face. Which they decide to do a LOT. Bafflingly, there’s scenes where two Ezra Miller’s aren’t even on screen, and they still CG his face as if it was one Miller and one stunt double. Like they couldn’t be assed to film it again with Miller or something.

It’s much messier than it needs to be. Hard to explain without spoiling. Something I was 90% sure was about to happen at the end then doesn’t happen. And I’ve seen multiple people who saw it early say that in the cut they saw, it did happen. Why on Earth they changed it I don’t know.

Just saw The Flash, think we’re gonna need a separate thread to unpick what the fuck’s going on moving forward. I enjoyed it though, gets a bit bogged down in the third act but probably my favourite DCEU movie.

Character, not movie. Whatever the fuck that means. ‘Character’ doesn’t mean much, he could be a character who just never shows up again. My guess is Gunn has standing orders not to rule out these things and tank their box office.

I don’t think they always clean, as everyone seemed quite interested in that question whenever anyone leaves: will they clean? And Rashida Jones already answered it; they want people inside to see the real world. A better question is, why don’t they realise that that cleaning never works? Do they think the cleaning wasn’t vigorous enough?

I worded that poorly to be fair … obviously there are entertaining stand alone movies. Top Gun sells itself as being an entertaining couple of hours, job done. But once you’ve started with a shared universe, those are the fans you’re attracting. Then a movie is both a movie, and another chapter in an ongoing saga. Shazam 2 has no momentum behind it because we know it isn’t going anywhere (even if Gunn said that, they can’t have planned for it in anyway). The same thing happened to the few X-Men movies that Fox spluttered out once we knew it was going to Disney; nobody cared anymore.

People like to preach that movies are entertaining in their own right and shared universes shouldn’t matter, but the ticket buying public keep insisting otherwise. They announced the universe it belonged to was dead before it came out; that killed it. Combine that with Shazam 1 making no real impact (releasing alongside Endgame) and the aforementioned universe being a complete shit show … I’m not at all surprised. Blue Beetle (aka Iron Man but Blue) will suffer the same fate, they’ve already told the audience it won’t matter. Aquaman 2 … eh, I still don’t really understand why 1 did so well so all bets are off there. Finally watching Peacemaker and man, this shit is funny. Bodes well for the Gunniverse.

…or that they simply aren’t desirable, given the immense amount of energy and materials they’d require. I start to get sceptical when we move to assuming advanced civilisations would harness suns to do insane feats of engineering. It’s possible that, once a civilisation confirms that travel beyond their solar system isn’t feasible, that they just improve their own quality of life on their planet, and maybe terraform others. There isn’t necessarily a linear relationship between advancement and energy consumption. Although overall, I’m more convinced by mega structures as the best candidate for something we might see. Everything else is us assuming that aliens will invent something noisy that we’ll detect, when we have no clue if that’s even possible or desirable. It just isn’t that tantalising a mystery to me, we experience silence from the stars when silence is a perfectly logical thing to expect.

And all those things require that you point your sensors in the right place, and they assume extraordinarily powerful telescopes. In terms of really shouting, we aren’t doing much right now. The image here emphasises this, our galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter. And our radio signals? 200. And the link also states that even with the correct technology, passed 100 light years, they’re too weak anyway. It needs an answer, I’m just not sure it merits the term ‘paradox’. ‘Why can’t we detect things that, as far as we know, shouldn’t be detectable’ isn’t a paradox. Some crude number crunching, but I believe to put anything detectable in each light year square of the surface area of our galaxy, you’d need 31,000,000,000 such devices. And I wonder if I’m off there cos even that seems low.

Here’s another assumption though; that ‘more advanced’ equals ‘noisier’. I’m not sure that’s true. Even in our limited technological lifespan, we’ve moved from radio waves to digital, ‘quieter’ signals. The current detectable evidence that humans are here is a pretty pathetic ring of radio waves that’s getting progressively weaker, and takes up a fraction of the Milky Way. So if we aren’t detectable, why do we assume others are? They probably are. The universe would have to teeming with trillions upon trillions of them before it became probable that we’d encounter one. It’s still an interesting discussion, but I just wonder if this isn’t a hard cap on the science. Much like how if you were to propose weather prediction to a meteorologist / mathematician, that we’d have Back To The Future II style to-the-second weather forecasts, they’d point out that chaos theory just doesn’t work that way. It’s inherently incalculable and always will be. And everything we know says that the light speed limit is the same. There’s obviously ways to transmit signals much more loudly, but then you have to point them in the right direction. You’d only know where to point them if someone took a punt and sent one to you first, so then we have the confluence of staggering luck for the first punt AND the luck that the species you pick were capable of sending something back. I imagine there may be rare cases where that luck has payed off, and there are species who are at least aware of each others existence. But meaningful communication, within lifetimes? Meaningful travel, where the two species can enjoy a relationship and flourish with it? I don’t see how that can happen, anywhere.

I wondered if it could be some weird form of claustrophobia, but no one even knows what that is cos they only know the Silo. Slightly better episode than the previous two this week, but I’m still feeling the slow drip-drip of info. I’m not sure how much this show has other than its mysteries, without that I don’t think any of the characters or plots episode to episode are enough to carry it. It did spark quite a conversation with my wife who had apparently never come across Pez dispensers. When you actually say it aloud, you realise how terrible those sweets are without the gimmick of the dispenser. I don’t think George would be too impressed with the answer to that Big Question; ‘it spits out sweets that nobody would ever eat if not spat out by a cartoon duck’.

Speaking of the Drake equation / Fermi paradox … I keep meaning to ask someone knowledgable in such matters about this, as I must be wrong given the number of experts who still talk about it. But I don’t understand what the paradox actually is. Yes, it’s extremely probable life exists on other planets. But I don’t understand the logic leap from there to “and also they probably have figured out interstellar communication / travel by now”. Everything we know about physics tells us the light speed limit is absolute, at best you can bend things a a bit using EXTRAORDINARY amounts of energy, and even then there’s no getting round the relativistic problems involved (any travellers would have to live with the fact that their species will move on many centuries in the time it takes to get anywhere). So the solution to “where are they” would seem to be “out there, just as frustrated as us that travel and communication at such distances is essentially impossible”. It’s depressing, but I think most if not all intelligent species will perish never knowing who else is out there.

Gloomhaven: Second Edition

I think weirdly, Kendall lovingly exacerbating Roman’s wound was my favourite scene from the finale. That’s the sort of messed up dynamics I show up for.

The thing I always think of with The Wire is how it lasted exactly as long as it should: it had a perfect five season plan, told that story, ended. Regardless of what you think of each season, those are the aspects of Baltimore it sought to portray. Sopranos is fantastic, but it basically existed for a while, then ended. It’s entirely plausible it could’ve been one more or one fewer seasons. I’m not sure it had a grand arc to it, it didn’t have a set story it wanted to tell. Succession fits that Sopranos mould really. It at least had a concept (uh, succession) but even with that, it hinted at that story right from the pilot with Logan having his episode on the helicopter. And then it just seemed to enjoy existing in that Act 2, and I loved it. My favourite episodes, my favourite moments, will likely be just innocuous ones that didn’t really move the plot along. I enjoy the dynamic of the basic characters, and I’m not necessarily all that interested in who happened to fuck who in the end. They’re all leaving this eye wateringly wealthy, and actually, maybe it’s best for Ken’s mental health in the long run that he finds something else and can always hold to this notion that he would’ve been great, rather than butchering what he sees as his only path in life. So yea, I wasn’t really floored by the episode, or the season overall which didn’t seem to make up its mind what it was about. Kinda like a great song that doesn’t want the weight of expectation on closing out an album. The show didn’t want the burden of … ending itself? Possibly that makes no sense. Anyway.

I’m still into this, although the last two episodes have been much slower. And they’re basically the same plot, following on from a death at the end of the last episode, our protagonists investigate and Judicial looks shady. I’m glad they addressed the lack of lifts. Or at least acknowledged it anyway.

Nope, Michael too. Can’t move for oranges in that trilogy. You can see him drop it as he dies.