DaveSumm

I might check out Slow Horses, I have ATV+ for free right now and I was toying between that, Constellation, Invasion or Shining Girls. Apple TV seems to be a bit stuck on 7/10ish series, they have the money to throw at these things but haven’t quite found their groove in my opinion. Severance is the only truly exceptional thing I’ve seen so far.

18 hours ago, 3CityApache said:

Ebon Moss-Bachrach is also Richard in The Bear and he is fantastic there.

Much like Alfre Woodward, this is his second role in the MCU after appearing in the Punisher Season 1. Weird to think how much of a flap we all got in about Woodward but no one seems to care now (although I guess this may not be in the sacred timeline).

Could it be set in the 60s, but (The Marvels spoilers)…

On 2/8/2024 at 10:00 PM, Werthead said:

wasn't this supposed to come just after Secret Invasion with ultra mega-depressed Nick Fury, who is now cuddling kittens?

Secret Invasion managed to not only be bad, and also boring, but actually made me more confused about the movie it was supposed to be teeing up. The fact that a bunch of Skrulls have a ton of ships, and have managed to successfully move to another planet (until the bad guy shows up anyway)… what the hell were the Earth ones doing? Sitting around waiting for Fury (human, has not travelled to other planets, limited access to interstellar craft) to rehouse some Skrulls (aliens, travelled to tons of planets with their ships) already didn’t make sense, and then The Marvels just rubs our nose in it by showing us Skrulls who have? OK I’m sure there’s different factions and what not, but they still didn’t explain why either of these factions are in the predicament they were in. I mean … it’s space! It’s big! 

6/10 overall, yea it was quite fun but it needed another 10-15 minutes to explain things a little better. We didn’t really get a great feel for Bad Guy’s motivations, or what the bangles are about or what they are, why the ending had to be done the way it did (this kind of took me out of it because the answer here is just “so we could do that credit scene”). Also…

I guess it’s part and parcel of Japanese being such a different language to English, but I was distracted quite regularly reading 1Q84 and wondering what was being lost in translation. I assume the title itself makes some sort of sense in Japanese, like 1Q would rhyme with 19? And the girl who spoke without question marks also struck me as odd, and I assumed was some other deviation from Japanese dialect. I also have a vague memory that explaining why Aomame didn’t like her name was a bit laboured, like it needed translating twice to grasp the connection to beans.

Unless I missed something, was this the first season with no connection to any others?

I read 1Q84, and I liked it well enough. My main issue is that it all has the feel of some grand mystery that will pay off in some elegant way, but it doesn’t really. It just kinda … floats poetically to a conclusion. A friend said it wasn’t his best work, so I tried Wind Up Bird Chronicle and again, it was enjoyable but not enough to carry on with any more of his works. It did contain some incredible passages (there’s a bit where someone recounts a time he got stuck down a well, it was years ago I read it so I can’t remember why it hit me really hard, but it did), but again, all the weirdness doesn’t really end up having an explanation, it’s all just a bit weird. 

I would say Wind Up is an easier commitment and still seems pretty representative of what you can expect in 1Q84, so start there. But whatever you get out of the first half, don’t expect the second half to bail you out if you’re not feeling it. Take each chapter on its own merits.

ETA: actually re-reading your post, I’m not sure if you’ve already read 1Q84, I assumed not.

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Perdido Street Station is a magnificent feat of worldbuilding with some decent characters and bugger-all plot. It's more of a mood piece than anything.

The second Bas-Lag novel, The Scar, is a vastly better book.

Ooo OK that might have tipped the scales then, thanks.

https://deadline.com/2024/01/andor-toby-haynes-star-trek-movie-seth-grahame-smith-writing-1235712646/

Quote

Sources tell Deadline that while plot details are being kept under wraps, the project is an origin story that takes place decades before the 2009 Star Trek film that rebooted the franchise.

Difficult to know what to make of that, an origin of what exactly? Decades before the main bit? Or the George Kirk bit? The Kelvin-verse? Or as far back as Enterprise times, maybe a Romulan War story?

I’ve only seen the first episode but FUCK I love seeing Daredevil again. I don’t really know why, something about that combination of abilities and the blindness and how Cox plays it, he’s just so freaking cool. God I hope Born Again is good.

Out of interest, where does Perdido Street Station rank amongst Mieville fans? I’m halfway through it now and it’s the first I’ve read by him, I’m kinda conflicted. I am really impressed with certain aspects, but there really is an enormous amount of pausing to describe the city. Basically anytime anyone goes anywhere, we get about five pages of them soaking up the sights before they get where they’re going. I may change my mind as the plot did suddenly turn up (on page 400), but I’m not sure I’m invested enough to read any more of Bas Lag. 

12 hours ago, Slurktan said:

Reminds me; since Disney is now saying the Netflix shows are canon...... should Blade ever come out is Ali the only repeat person in the MCU?

Alfred Woodward was also in Luke Cage and Civil War as two different characters.

I would probably do:

Daredevil Season 1

Jessica Jones Season 1

Daredevil Season 2

If you were intrigued enough by Luke Cage in JJ, then Luke Cage Season 1 (starts great, ends badly)

Read a synopsis of Iron Fist Season 1 but for the love of god don’t watch it

Defenders

Punisher Season 1

Daredevil Season 3

That’s all the good seasons of the Netflix stuff, but I agree Echo won’t lean on any of it. But Daredevil is a great show worth watching anyway (it’s annoying that Defenders is kinda Daredevil 2.5 so you’d need to watch it to understand Season 3, but then you kinda need Iron Fist to understand Defenders).

5 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Are the above Daredevil clips from the original Netflix series? I've never seen it, as Daredevil was just never "my thing". 

Yes, a lot of the Kingpin stuff is from the original show. All the stuff with his younger self. Each to their own but Daredevil for me is pretty comfortably the best Marvel TV show, I’m praying they can do it justice here and in Born Again.

OK so we can finally kill off these canon questions stone dead, yes the Netflix show is 100% the same continuity.

I thought I’d become somewhat acclimatised to the domestic violence in this season, but that was an incredibly upsetting episode. It’d be so cathartic at this point if the last two episodes were just Roy Tillman getting slowly beaten to death.

After randomly catching Die Hard on TV at Christmas, I just kept going and now I’ve watched 1 through 4. I heard 5 is bad though. 

Also, watched Palm Springs and it was really fun. Rom-com time loop. 

Marvel is in such a weird place right now. They kinda want the Multiverse saga to just be over and start fresh (no, I don’t mean reboot) with F4 and X-Men. But I don’t think they can just abandon a whole saga. Recast is my best guess, but even the character of Kang isn’t that promising right now. He’s been in two seasons of a decent-ish-ly received series and a poorly received movie. I’d actually respect them quite a bit if that just scrapped the whole idea, declared Phase 5 the end of that saga and move on.

Is that a popular opinion that Season 4 was boring? I thought it was great. I’ve loved all of them, probably Season 3 the weakest for me.

It is crazy that a show can be a largely plausible, present day non-fantasy story and yet still have the audience asking “is that guy 500 years old?”

I’ve only seen the first two, but the magic has kinda gone for me sadly. I’ll keep watching, but as far as characters, dialogue, writing and acting go? This just isn’t first rate television. Maybe it was always like this, but there used to be something so exciting about seeing the advances on the show. But this season it’s like .. eh, the Mars colony is bigger. When the Russians shot up the moon base back in season 1, I was so invested then, it still felt close enough to history that somehow it made it shocking.

We have our mandated first episode Space Disaster. A moron who decides to put his family back together by leaving them for two years without reading the fine print. I dunno, it all feels cliched somehow.

The ‘we’re a pair of screw ups’ conversation was weird with Aleida and Kelly. Aleida has entirely understandable PTSD, Kelly is a hugely successful NASA scientist whose project got delayed through no fault of her own.

Remember when Feige said they were going to drop Phases all together? I imagined he was thinking that, kinda like comics, we didn’t need to immediately launch into the next Big Event. I think the idea was that we’d all take a breath and have some more isolated stories that introduced some new characters.

But sadly this coincided with Chapek taking over with other plans; to ramp things up and have constant D+ shows. I think that’s the heart of the issue for me, this fundamental clash between taking a beat and milking it simultaneously. Suddenly Feige had to adopt phases once again, and then hurriedly announce the Next Big Thing after a few duds. Throw in Boseman’s death and Covid to really make things difficult.

The good thing is, I don’t think they’ve made any decisions that ruin anything. The MCU could start churning out gold tomorrow and we’d all be back on board I suppose, it’s not like the SW prequels where they’re just so shit that there’s no course correcting. On paper, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having the return of Daredevil / Kingpin, X-Men, F4, Blade, a just-starting-out-in-NYC Spider-Man. There’s a truck load of potential there, if they can just make it all good.

Yup, throughly enjoyed that. It really tied up the season and my initial impression is that it’s a fair way better than season 1. It’s probably my favourite season of D+ MCU shows, off the top of my head. It felt a lot like how they presented the ‘real’ Scarlet Witch and the end of WandaVision, finally getting the true Norse god Loki. 

So my interpretation is:

Final Marvels trailer, in which they try to imply that this is some kind of Endgame sequel. Pretty desperate stuff.

I did see an interesting theory on Reddit that Loki is actually creating the TVA in episode 5, he’s getting variants together and giving them a new name before their home timeline is erased, and recruiting OB to create tempads, all in a room that could well be the same set as the room we first met OB in in episode 1. Loki could position himself as the leader from here on out.

I think the problem is, the whole first season led to ‘the TVA is done, the multiverse is open!’

But then Season 2 said…

’…or at least, it would be if not for this loom we never mentioned.’

So the stakes are basically, either fix the loom and leave things as they were when Season 1 started, or don’t and leave things where Season 1 ended. Neither are that interesting given we’ve already contemplated those outcomes.