Watch, Watching, Watch -- Keep the change you filthy animal!

[Heartofice]

1 hour ago, Fury Resurrected said:

I thought it was pretty obviously about the human need to make art

Great thanks.. I’ll.. pass that on. 
 

[Corvinus85]

Speaking of Station 11, I have two questions for those who finished:

Spoiler

How did Tyler blow up the tower? I'm not sure how his little device connected to anything and I didn't see any indication of him having snuck in a mine.

I suppose killing off the Conductor was to allow Kirsten to become the Symphony's leader, but I'm not entirely sure what was the purpose of the character. 

 

[Zorral]

This won't bring back to the theaters all those who aren't on that train. 

 

[Corvinus85]

7 minutes ago, Zorral said:

This won't bring back to the theaters all those who aren't on that train. 

 

I'm guessing Avatar 2 is the one but it will still be a Disney movie.

[RumHam]

1 hour ago, Corvinus85 said:

Speaking of Station 11, I have two questions for those who finished:

  Reveal hidden contents

How did Tyler blow up the tower? I'm not sure how his little device connected to anything and I didn't see any indication of him having snuck in a mine.

I suppose killing off the Conductor was to allow Kirsten to become the Symphony's leader, but I'm not entirely sure what was the purpose of the character. 

 

I need to watch that whole thing again, because I know I missed a lot. That's not a bad thing though I love shows like that.

Spoiler

I have no idea how he blew up the tower. 

As I understand it the book plot is quite different, maybe the Conductor is there because she was in the book? Anyway someone had to be the leader and find Kirsten. I definitely want to read the book eventually.

One thing that confused me was the timing of Alex's birth and all that. Jeevan gets mauled and abducted during the first winter, no? I dunno it seems like Tyler wasn't on his own long enough to have left such an impression on Rose before she dies in childbirth. 

On another note I watched way too much of Netflix's Archive 81 last night. I think five episodes before I forced myself to go to sleep. Really good horror series, so far. 

[Zorral]

2 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

I'm guessing Avatar 2 is the one but it will still be a Disney movie.

There have only been two films that came out in the last 1 - 2 years my sort of audience wanted to see, Dune and The Last Duel, and both of them appeared in a timely fashion on HBO. 

Superhero comix, supernatural, horror, etc. don't appeal to us.  We've also fairly lost interest in sf/f stuff too -- though there are exceptions, such as Dune mentioned above. Yet Dune, nice as it was, should have, could have been better.  Even with two films, a high budget television series is what is necessary to do it really right.

 

[DMC]

Couple comments on the "how shows ended" tangent in the Whedon thread that is now locked..

First, someone mentioned West Wing as a show that ended well despite changing showrunners after season 4.  As a devotee, I'm not sure I agree.  The last season really tapered off and the ending (really the last 4 or 5 episodes) was rather anticlimatic.  Plus what really stands out with that one is they entirely changed the ending midway through the last season after John Spencer died.

@sifth

Quote

Spoiler

Yea, I don't think that's true at all. They left the mysteries vague, so fans could debate of them for years to come. Like the magic light in the middle of the island, the one that the old lady says everyone has a little in them, but always wants more. "Maybe it's time", "Maybe it's happiness" "maybe it's this other random thing", the fact is, no answer was given. That's how I recall most of the "answers" on that show being given.

 

Spoiler

Well, the example you're giving here is really just failing to answer the question "what is the island," which Wert already mentioned.  And I wholeheartedly agree with him that there's no satisfying answer to that question anyway.  At least I can't think of one, if you got any ideas I'd love to hear em!  (Seriously, not being a smartass, I enjoy talking about this.)

And Wert is also right that other than that Lost did address most every major mystery/question.  One problem some people have is not that they didn't answer it, but rather they didn't like the answer.  "Across the Sea," the third to last episode, answers a whole hell of a lot.  But it's also one of the worst episodes of the series.  I've rewatched the series more times than I care to share and the main unanswered mystery that comes to mind (other than what is the island) is who was shooting at Locke, Sawyer, Juliet et al. in the outrigger chase while they were time traveling.

 

[Ramsay B.]

1 hour ago, RumHam said:

On another note I watched way too much of Netflix's Archive 81 last night. I think five episodes before I forced myself to go to sleep. Really good horror series, so far. 

I watched this because I’m a sucker for demonology/occult type stuff. It was decent but it dragged at times, and I didn’t care for the ending either. The lead actor(Mamoudou Athie)was weak as hell too. 

[sifth]

1 hour ago, DMC said:

Couple comments on the "how shows ended" tangent in the Whedon thread that is now locked..

First, someone mentioned West Wing as a show that ended well despite changing showrunners after season 4.  As a devotee, I'm not sure I agree.  The last season really tapered off and the ending (really the last 4 or 5 episodes) was rather anticlimatic.  Plus what really stands out with that one is they entirely changed the ending midway through the last season after John Spencer died.

@sifth

  Reveal hidden contents

Well, the example you're giving here is really just failing to answer the question "what is the island," which Wert already mentioned.  And I wholeheartedly agree with him that there's no satisfying answer to that question anyway.  At least I can't think of one, if you got any ideas I'd love to hear em!  (Seriously, not being a smartass, I enjoy talking about this.)

And Wert is also right that other than that Lost did address most every major mystery/question.  One problem some people have is not that they didn't answer it, but rather they didn't like the answer.  "Across the Sea," the third to last episode, answers a whole hell of a lot.  But it's also one of the worst episodes of the series.  I've rewatched the series more times than I care to share and the main unanswered mystery that comes to mind (other than what is the island) is who was shooting at Locke, Sawyer, Juliet et al. in the outrigger chase while they were time traveling.

 

Yea, Across the Sea did a very good job of not answering questions I recall or should I say answering questions in the manner I described the magic light; in other words the "what do you think it means" approach. 

Spoiler

Take the smoke monster for example. We're never told what it is in that episode. Jacob throws his brother into the magic light. The light spits him out and a smoke monster shows up shortly after the fact. That's about it. Earlier in the episode, the old lady says "if you fall into the light it is a fate worse than death". So did his soul turn into the smoke monster or did throwing him in, wake the beast. We'll never know, because no answer was only given, just a "what do you think it means" type of answer. We're never told what the monster is and each season they kept changing what it was. One season it was a security system for the island. The next season it was a weapon Ben could control. The season after that it was a judge of the island, that was worshiped by Egyptians. I think you get my point though.

Though that wasn't the one that bothered me the most.

My biggest issue with the show was, that in all of the flashback there was this constant sense of 6 degrees of separation. Locke worked about a box factory that Hurley owned, Jack and Claire were half siblings and so on. All of it added up to nothing. It was just a mystery or scam in a way, to get the audience to keep watching.

 

[Werthead]

Checked out Ghostbusters: Afterlife. It falls into that Force Awakens category of being a nostalgic retread which uses the old cast to introduce the new one and has a lot of pleasing fanservice, but they kind of tell a reasonably good story with it. I think Afterlife is somewhat more successful because it's cleverer in finding hanging threads from the original movie to more organically develop a sequel (it did feel like there was no particular reason to assume Gozer and Company were defeated for good in the OG movie) and it kept the original characters' presence more to a minimum. If anything, it was odd that the credits sequences seemed to suggest a much more heavily nostalgic sequel with the old Ghostbusters more heavily featured rather than completing the hand-off to do something more original.

I'm also a bit puzzled on when exactly Egon is supposed to have had a kid: Carrie Coon was born 3 years before Ghostbusters came out so Callie was probably also born before the events of the film (though Coon can certainly play a few years younger), which tracks with her not knowing who Janine is. But if that's the case it's odd she's not mentioned in the two OG movies, especially given Egon's thing about being more interested in fungus than dating. If she was born between GB1 and 2, that doesn't explain why she wasn't closer to Egon (who couldn't work as a Ghostbuster in that time). And being born after GB2 would make her almost too young to have a 15-year-old kid in Afterlife.

I started watching Kevin Can F Himself and the deliberately jarring tonal shifts between the psychological drama and old-skool American sitcom formats are extremely well-done and Annie Murphy's performance is superb.

1 hour ago, DMC said:

Couple comments on the "how shows ended" tangent in the Whedon thread that is now locked..

First, someone mentioned West Wing as a show that ended well despite changing showrunners after season 4.  As a devotee, I'm not sure I agree.  The last season really tapered off and the ending (really the last 4 or 5 episodes) was rather anticlimatic.  Plus what really stands out with that one is they entirely changed the ending midway through the last season after John Spencer died.

@sifth

  Hide contents

Well, the example you're giving here is really just failing to answer the question "what is the island," which Wert already mentioned.  And I wholeheartedly agree with him that there's no satisfying answer to that question anyway.  At least I can't think of one, if you got any ideas I'd love to hear em!  (Seriously, not being a smartass, I enjoy talking about this.)

And Wert is also right that other than that Lost did address most every major mystery/question.  One problem some people have is not that they didn't answer it, but rather they didn't like the answer.  "Across the Sea," the third to last episode, answers a whole hell of a lot.  But it's also one of the worst episodes of the series.  I've rewatched the series more times than I care to share and the main unanswered mystery that comes to mind (other than what is the island) is who was shooting at Locke, Sawyer, Juliet et al. in the outrigger chase while they were time traveling.

 

Yeah, they did actually have an idea what the Island was in Season 1, but they decided not to pull the trigger on it. And then Beyond the Sea was supposed to but Lindelof and Cuse seemed to bottle it at the last minute (recall that they were outlining episodes and announcing the titles and synopses before they'd actually written them, and going from writing the episode to having the episode in the can and edited often happened in less than two months), after they'd already hyped the episode up. I think there's generally three answers to the question: something really cheesy, like it's an organic alien spaceship; something even more mystical than they wanted to go for (it's Eden or whatever inspired the myth of Eden, and the smoke monster and the light are related to the source of human life/consciousness and original sin, which I think is what they were leaning towards with Jacob and his brother as a Cain and Abel allegory); or the answer they probably should have gone for but realised people would claim was a cop-out, that Island is literally what it appears to be: a naturally-occurring but completely unique island with weird electromagnetic properties that allows it to move in time and space, and everything's that happened is down to people fiddling around with its properties instead of just leaving it the fuck alone.

[DMC]

9 minutes ago, sifth said:

Spoiler

Take the smoke monster for example. We're never told what it is in that episode. Jacob throws his brother into the magic light. The light spits him out and a smoke monster shows up shortly after the fact. That's about it. Earlier in the episode, the old lady says "if you fall into the light it is a fate worse than death". So did his soul turn into the smoke monster or did throwing him in, wake the beast. We'll never know, because no answer was only given, just a "what do you think it means" type of answer. We're never told what the monster is and each season they kept changing what it was. One season it was a security system for the island. The next season it was a weapon Ben could control. The season after that it was a judge of the island, that was worshiped by Egyptians. I think you get my point though.

 

Spoiler

I'm not sure what the complaint is here.  The smoke monster is, clearly, Jacob's twin, or the man in black, or whatever you want to call him.  He confirms this throughout the final season - one example would be telling Kate his mother was crazy.  Why he was given those powers when Jacob threw him into the heart of the island I suppose is still a "mystery," but again, I'd chalk that up to the "what is the island" question.

As for each season "changing what it was," the examples you provide are just interpretations of what certain characters thought the monster was.  Danielle is the one who said it was a security system (and we find out in Season 5 this idea was actually her lover Robert's).  Ben is the one who thinks the monster is supposed to judge him - which the monster very much took advantage of.

 

16 minutes ago, sifth said:

Spoiler

My biggest issue with the show was, that in all of the flashback there was this constant sense of 6 degrees of separation. Locke worked about a box factory that Hurley owned, Jack and Claire were half siblings and so on. All of it added up to nothing. It was just a mystery or scam in a way, to get the audience to keep watching.

 

Spoiler

Well, sure, they didn't "explain" all their freaky coincidental connections.  Not sure how they would - seemed pretty clear that they were just conveying that these people were all connected through the island, which many of them specifically connected as candidates chosen (and watched over) by Jacob.

 

8 minutes ago, Werthead said:

something even more mystical than they wanted to go for (it's Eden or whatever inspired the myth of Eden, and the smoke monster and the light are related to the source of human life/consciousness and original sin, which I think is what they were leaning towards with Jacob and his brother as a Cain and Abel allegory); or the answer they probably should have gone for but realised people would claim was a cop-out, that Island is literally what it appears to be: a naturally-occurring but completely unique island with weird electromagnetic properties that allows it to move in time and space, and everything's that happened is down to people fiddling around with its properties instead of just leaving it the fuck alone.

I've always been fine with both of these answers - and in my headcanon they aren't really mutually exclusive - but you're right, people probably would have been even more pissed if they went with the latter.

[sifth]

46 minutes ago, DMC said:

  Hide contents

I'm not sure what the complaint is here.  The smoke monster is, clearly, Jacob's twin, or the man in black, or whatever you want to call him.  He confirms this throughout the final season - one example would be telling Kate his mother was crazy.  Why he was given those powers when Jacob threw him into the heart of the island I suppose is still a "mystery," but again, I'd chalk that up to the "what is the island" question.

As for each season "changing what it was," the examples you provide are just interpretations of what certain characters thought the monster was.  Danielle is the one who said it was a security system (and we find out in Season 5 this idea was actually her lover Robert's).  Ben is the one who thinks the monster is supposed to judge him - which the monster very much took advantage of.

 

  Hide contents

Well, sure, they didn't "explain" all their freaky coincidental connections.  Not sure how they would - seemed pretty clear that they were just conveying that these people were all connected through the island, which many of them specifically connected as candidates chosen (and watched over) by Jacob.

 

I've always been fine with both of these answers - and in my headcanon they aren't really mutually exclusive - but you're right, people probably would have been even more pissed if they went with the latter.

Spoiler

Give me the episode in which The Man in Black tells us that he's Jacob's brother? What we know about the beast is, it can change form and steal memories. So he literally becomes anyone he turns into, just evil. So literally anything the guy says can be viewed as BS. Plus we see Jacob's brother get spit out of the light; I mean heck Jacob buried him next to his mother. So what did his soul get turn into the monster than; if so what episode was this ever explained in? Also on the subject of the smoke monster, why did he suddenly get trapped in his Locke form, aside from the obvious reason of wanting to keep Terry Quinn on the show? Because that too is something that never got answered.

Listen, if you have a mystery driven show, you should at least have answers to your mysteries is all I'm saying. I don't always hate the "what do you think it means" style of storytelling that Damon Lindelof used a dozen and a half times on lost, but I think most shows shouldn't create mysteries without at least some plan as to what the answer is. Heck a lot of the time, Lost would often answer a question with another question, which is not an answer.

I'm sorry, but what you call different perspectives, I call poor writing. If they had a clear idea if the smoke monster was a guard, judge, or just some evil dude who wanted to kill everyone, they would have set him up as that from day one. They couldn't constantly give red herrings up the nose, most of which led nowhere.

 

 

[Mark Antony]

Episode 3 of Arcane. Wow. Wasn’t enthralled with the show after the first two episodes but ep 3 was really incredible. 

[sifth]

49 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Checked out Ghostbusters: Afterlife. It falls into that Force Awakens category of being a nostalgic retread which uses the old cast to introduce the new one and has a lot of pleasing fanservice, but they kind of tell a reasonably good story with it. I think Afterlife is somewhat more successful because it's cleverer in finding hanging threads from the original movie to more organically develop a sequel (it did feel like there was no particular reason to assume Gozer and Company were defeated for good in the OG movie) and it kept the original characters' presence more to a minimum. If anything, it was odd that the credits sequences seemed to suggest a much more heavily nostalgic sequel with the old Ghostbusters more heavily featured rather than completing the hand-off to do something more original.

I'm also a bit puzzled on when exactly Egon is supposed to have had a kid: Carrie Coon was born 3 years before Ghostbusters came out so Callie was probably also born before the events of the film (though Coon can certainly play a few years younger), which tracks with her not knowing who Janine is. But if that's the case it's odd she's not mentioned in the two OG movies, especially given Egon's thing about being more interested in fungus than dating. If she was born between GB1 and 2, that doesn't explain why she wasn't closer to Egon (who couldn't work as a Ghostbuster in that time). And being born after GB2 would make her almost too young to have a 15-year-old kid in Afterlife.

I started watching Kevin Can F Himself and the deliberately jarring tonal shifts between the psychological drama and old-skool American sitcom formats are extremely well-done and Annie Murphy's performance is superb.

Yeah, they did actually have an idea what the Island was in Season 1, but they decided not to pull the trigger on it. And then Beyond the Sea was supposed to but Lindelof and Cuse seemed to bottle it at the last minute (recall that they were outlining episodes and announcing the titles and synopses before they'd actually written them, and going from writing the episode to having the episode in the can and edited often happened in less than two months), after they'd already hyped the episode up. I think there's generally three answers to the question: something really cheesy, like it's an organic alien spaceship; something even more mystical than they wanted to go for (it's Eden or whatever inspired the myth of Eden, and the smoke monster and the light are related to the source of human life/consciousness and original sin, which I think is what they were leaning towards with Jacob and his brother as a Cain and Abel allegory); or the answer they probably should have gone for but realised people would claim was a cop-out, that Island is literally what it appears to be: a naturally-occurring but completely unique island with weird electromagnetic properties that allows it to move in time and space, and everything's that happened is down to people fiddling around with its properties instead of just leaving it the fuck alone.

To be honest, I would have been fine with literally any answer, be it good or bad. I just wanted something after all this time.

[williamjm]

5 hours ago, Corvinus85 said:

I'm guessing Avatar 2 is the one but it will still be a Disney movie.

It's also definitely a sequel.

[DMC]

14 minutes ago, sifth said:

Spoiler

Give me the episode in which The Man in Black tells us that he's Jacob's brother? What we know about the beast is, it can change form and steal memories. So he literally becomes anyone he turns into, just evil. So literally anything the guy says can be viewed as BS. Plus we see Jacob's brother get spit out of the light; I mean heck Jacob buried him next to his mother. So what did his soul get turn into the monster than; if so what episode was this ever explained in? Also on the subject of the smoke monster, why did he suddenly get trapped in his Locke form, aside from the obvious reason of wanting to keep Terry Quinn on the show? Because that too is something that never got answered.

 

Spoiler

There isn't an episode where the MiB explicitly says he's Jacob's brother, but there is an episode where Jacob explicitly identifies the MiB as his brother.  In the penultimate episode "What They Died For" Jacob tells the remaining candidates that he "was responsible" for the MiB and "made him that way."  I don't know how much more clear the show had to get than that.  Not to mention the fact the MiB has the exact same motivation as Jacob's brother in "Across the Sea" - leaving the island.

As for the MiB being "stuck" in Locke's form, yes, that's a very dumb explanation and deserves criticism, but that's not really an unsolved mystery..it's just a really shitty and expedient explanation.

The more interesting outstanding question about "the smoke monster" is whether his "mother" (Allison Janney) was one as well.  It is heavily suggested she was in Across the Sea when she, apparently, is able to destroy the village of the survivors and fill the MiB's well all by herself.  And if she was, that in turn suggests people can attain these abilities by using or abusing the magical pool of electromagnetism.

 

[RumHam]

Lost:

Spoiler

I'm still convinced the smoke monster was intended to be a DHARMA created cloud of nanobots until people guessed it.
Which is a real shame.

 

[TheLastWolf]

Drive was simply fantastic, Ryan Gosling lets the silence speak for him in a way few actors can manipulate it

[RumHam]

1 hour ago, TheLastWolf said:

Drive was simply fantastic, Ryan Gosling lets the silence speak for him in a way few actors can manipulate it

The prequel Baby Drive is also very good. 

[Argonath Diver]

Finished up Arcane last night. Man what a terrific show. The last two episodes were really satisfying but did a great job setting up something that could open up into multiple seasons or spin offs. I know little about League of Legends but I assume multiple characters from the show are heroes in that game, as several characters seemed to settle into video game style classes. That was the only part of the series that felt "video gamey" to me; I really liked a lot of the character depth they managed for something that I assumed would stay formulaic but gorgeous. 

And boy was that show great looking. Although the action scenes were of course great,  I thought they did a terrific job with the animation as well as the sumptuous backdrops and landscape shots.

Give me more digital animation like this and the Spiderverse films every night of the week. Now there's the Spidey sequel I really want! (I still haven't seen No Way Home)