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Hijack (2023)
Asininity galore
With just a pinch of professionalism, we are given the most idiotic and unbelievable hijack ever portrayed in TV or movie, the most laughable and preposterous government meeting you can imagine, and the government's utterly ludicrous and absurd decisions.
In order to enjoy and appreciate this series, not only you need to disconnect your eyes and ears from your thinking brain, you must also be under the influence of bad shows and worse movies. Unfortunately, that's precisely the condition many of us are suffering from nowadays.
If you are lucky enough not to suffer from this condition, your urge to quit would be overwhelming.
Silo: The Getaway (2023)
A fantastic twist desperately needed.
I haven't read the books and I don't know anything about them. I've just been watching this series, and I must say that it really seems to be going nowhere.
At last, Nichols (whose bones have proven to be harder and more resistant than stone) has managed to access the hard drive.
Good. And what happened?
She has been moved to tears by a video message from her late lover, and she has seen decades-old images of the outside.
Great. So what?
When Sheriff Holston went out to clean he saw the very same images. They were obviously fake, and minutes later poor Holston crumbled down, killed by the poisonous air.
Considering that the show has been renewed for a second season, I must assume that next week the writers will astonish us with a truly fantastic twist.
Otherwise, this show would stink more than their poisoned, rotting bodies.
1899 (2022)
Meaningless twists adrift in an ocean of emptiness
As it seems, Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese have been so pumped up by the success of Dark that their creativity burst out like an over-inflated latex balloon.
I do appreciate lots of interacting characters, multiple storylines, and complicated plots that compel you to strain your attention and rack your brains searching for explanations. But the more a plot is dense and intricate, the more it needs to be sensible and meaningful. Unfortunately, 1899 happens to be neither.
The show being obviously conceived as a multi-season series, it would be perfectly correct (and necessary) to leave questions unanswered and narrative threads dangling, but this is not what the first season of 1899 does.
What it does, instead, is put before our eyes and ears a whole bunch of characters whose secrets lead nowhere, a meandering story that follows a winding and directionless path, and a final twist which the authors surely consider original and noteworthy, but which is actually cheap and nonsensical.
Will season two rectify this mess? We are free to hope so, but let's be prepared for the worst.
House of the Dragon: The Rogue Prince (2022)
Without form, and void
'Without form, and void': this quotation from the second verse of the King James Bible is the highest praise this episode can possibly deserve.
The series is already spiraling down, and a future recovery is most unlikely.
However, it is most likely that, episode after episode, legions of worshipping fans will keep posting rave reviews and inundate IMDb with 10/10 ratings.
The HBO guys are obviously resting on their laurels and, being reasonably certain to gain a lot of money anyway, have made the feeblest possible effort towards the viewers. What can be said to all those who are responsible for this shameful prequel?
The ancients found the appropriate answer long ago: beati possidentes.
House of the Dragon: The Heirs of the Dragon (2022)
Miscast and lazy
Many characters are cursorily introduced at the same time, many fleshless names are shot at the audience, and nobody has a bit of charisma.
The plot is not only dull, but also unfocused. For example, it would seem there's going to be an important conflict between Daemon Targaryen and Ser Criston Cole, but that is very sloppily prepared. And if there won't be any conflict, Daemon's defeat in the tournament is pointless.
Another example. The scene of Daemon's killings and maimings is poorly conceived: we are told the victims are criminals, but we haven't seen any public disorder or unlawful behavior.
One more example. The sore in the king's back should be supposed to mean something ominous, but there's no sense of foreboding and the scene is wrapped up carelessly.
One last example. What is the idea behind Alicent's night visit to the mourning king? Beside the fact that such a visit is outlandish, does it imply something sexually charged? We would have expected so, but the scene leads nowhere. Sure, the widowed king may well marry Alicent later on, but are we presumed to believe that she opened up the path to the marriage by striking him with her compassionate soul?
To sum up, nothing more than a botched attempt at resurrecting Game of Thrones.
Better Call Saul: Saul Gone (2022)
A good solution to the writers' main problem
When Gilligan and Gould started to write Better Call Saul, a prequel, they had a narrow path in front of them and a few problems to solve.
First of all, they couldn't confine themselves to just show us Saul's past up to the beginning of Breaking Bad. That would have been a very poor choice. They had to go beyond Breaking Bad and show us Saul's life all the way to the end, that's to say up to his death or to some event after which his arc would be closed.
Second, they had to beef up his life and create new characters. They did that quite successfully with Kim, Chuck, Howard, Nacho and Lalo.
None of these new characters, however, appears in Breaking Bad. So, what were the writers to do with them? Of course, at the right intervals, they had to kill them off.
And here comes the stroke of dramatic genius: kill off all of them, but one.
Why one of them had to survive?
Because someone deeply relevant to the story is absolutely central to a well written "catastrophe" (the very final part of a drama and, plotwise, the writer's main problem). A tragic hero's downfall can't be brought about by someone who happens to pop up or through mere chance.
Saul's arrest after newly-arrived Marion has alerted the authorities is not the catastrophe: the catastrophe takes place in front of the judge, and is triggered by Kim, the survivor, the sole legitimate one.
Kim is thus all-important, and her arc is already closed. Nothing remains to do but to close Saul's arc as well, and that is done through his confession, a confession spurred by the one Kim has already made. Without Kim's presence in court and Kim's confession, Saul would have been altogether happy with the seven-year sentence he had shrewdly managed to negotiate. And if that had happened, Saul would have been the only important character with an unfinished story, a tremendous mistake, unthinkable for two writers as gifted as Gilligan and Gould.
However, Saul chooses to spend the rest of his life in a supermax prison instead of seven years in a much more friendly environment. Can such a choice be regarded as consistent with what he is?
Not entirely. After learning that Kim has atoned, Saul is psychologically compelled to atone as well, but the price he pays is a bit too high. It is true that by confessing he magnifies his role in Breaking Bad and serves his ego a tasty dish, but he makes his future miserable and Kim is lost anyway. Who, in his shoes, would have done the same?
In addition, there's no foreshadowing for this bizarre choice. When he and Mike talk about time travel, while Mike poignantly implies he wouldn't have taken his first fateful bribe, Saul just speaks of getting rich. And when talking with Walt about regrets, he makes Walt rightly comment "so you were always like this".
That said, Saul had to die or be locked up. The writers had no other viable choice.
Saul's death being dramatically unjustified, to solve their main problem Gilligan and Gould could do nothing else than put him away for life.
They did that somehow abruptly and not flawlessly, but with an elegant and touching twist, and must be praised for that.