ivko Reviews

M*A*S*H: Edwina (1972) Season 1, Episode 13

ages like a fine wine

[5/10 · 28 January 2022]

The title of this review is heavily sarcastic. All shows age, and eventually even shows that were considered liberal in their time will find themselves on the wrong side of social change. M*A*S*H, one of the most popular television shows in the history of the medium, is no exception to this rule, and this episode in particular is a stunning example of just how different social norms were when the show launched in 1972.

One of the recurring plot elements on the show was that the doctors and nurses of the 4077 unit engaged in heavy fraternization with one another, even when they had husbands and wives back home. It's presented as a coping mechanism for the horrors of war, usually with the unspoken assumption that whatever romance took place would remain a secret from spouses and boyfriends/girlfriends, and would end when their tours ended. It also helps to keep in mind that the show was created in an historically unusual time period between the start of mass produced penicillin, which cured many sexually transmitted diseases for the first time, and before diseases like AIDS had entered into the public consciousness, meaning that sex, rightly or wrongly, was often perceived at the time as a harmless diversion with few consequences.

Anyhow, the basic plot is that one of the nurses named Edwina was being sent home in a few weeks and confesses her sadness to another nurse that she hadn't experienced any intimacy during her time in the unit. The nurses decide to band together and deny the men their usual sport unless one of the guys gives Edwina the experience she longs for.

The plot isn't that extraordinary. What is unusual is the behavior of the main characters, and the fact that it's presented as expected behavior for the shows protagonists. Married men are having affairs with the nurses, not even bothering to be coy about it; in fact, during a party scene Hawkeye even makes a joke about how many of them are cheating on their spouses. Officers are also seen carrying on with women who are in their chain of command, which is largely regarded as rape today even if it's consensual. When the nurses cut off the men they become enraged, as though they were being denied something that rightly belonged to them, even going so far as to storm into the C. O'.s office and demand that he order the nurses back on their backs, as it were.

One scene in particular that shocked me involved Radar, the shy young man that is presented as the shows archetypal 'nice guy', emerging from behind a tent rubbing his eye. Seems Radar was doing his usual thing of peering through a hole he made to watch the nurses bathe, but because of the embargo the girls thumped him in the eye this morning instead of, I guess, just letting some perv watch them naked. Hawkeye spots him and laughs about it, joking that he may have to settle for spying on the men showering for a while. In any show or movie made in the last decade a character spying on girls showering would usually be portrayed as the creepiest of creepy weirdos. And even in the rare situation where it's played for laughs (Rick & Morty, American Dad!) it's usually in some kind of over-the-top scenario that's meant to feel zany or silly, like they're trying to recreate a scene from an 80's movie or something. The idea that a well-liked character like Radar would do something like that and that the shows main character would find it funny instead of creepy is pretty mind blowing from a contemporary perspective.

I was too young to watch M*A*S*H on its first run, but the show was still heavily syndicated more than a decade after it ended and I watched it then, becoming a fan. But it's been over two decades since even my late arrival to the show, and re-watching it now via streaming has been pretty eye opening as to just how much our culture today differs after 50 years. So much so that I actually think younger viewers will need a historical primer to appreciate what might seem like monstrous behavior. Not all episodes are as blatant as this one, but it serves to highlight quite a few major changes to cultural norms.

Zone 414 (2021)

falls short of what it attempts

[5/10 · 4 January 2022]

Zone 414 desperately wants to be Blade Runner. It outright copies numerous elements including the dystopian view of a future where humans can build intelligence but cage it to service our darker passions, the gloomy atmosphere where civilization seems trapped in perpetual night, even the anachronistic use of outdated machinery alongside futuristic technology that suggests a kind of sociological stasis despite wonderous scientific achievement. But for all it mimics, Zone 414 fails to recreate the moody, thoughtful experience of Blade Runner.

Part of that is in the casting, as the Blade Runner franchise benefited from some of the top talent in Hollywood. Part of it is from the lower budget of Zone 414 that doesn't allow for the same level of set design and special affects. But the biggest part of it comes down to the fact that Zone 414 doesn't tread any new ground. When Blade Runner was released it struggled to find an audience because it presented an unusual take on the future: it presented a world where mankind had accomplished feats we can only dream of, but instead of Han Solo and Princess Leia it presented only a world of broken and unhappy people desperate for something that their society seemed to have lost. Instead of science making our dreams come true, it had instead stagnated and isolated us.

Zone 414 very much implies a similar future, but instead of a fresh take it feels trapped by its inspiration to recreate the same dynamics, right down to the leads being a broken couple who ultimately find the only solution is to run away together hoping to find something better together than what life handed them individually. The problem this created for me is that if the movie is so directly copying another, better creation, what is the point of it?

Anyway, that's my impression of the movie. I found it mildly interesting at parts but mostly kind of dull. The basic plot, for those who are interested, is a future in which hyper-realistic human androids have been developed. Their cost makes personal ownership prohibitive for all except the one percent of the one percent, but a city entirely populated by androids, Zone 414, has been created where the merely rich, as opposed to the filthy rich, can visit to live out their personal fantasies. The inventor and industrial tycoon who owns the city hires former detective David Carmichael to find his daughter who has disappeared in the city, and connects him with the most advanced android model, Jane, that lives in the zone, to assist in the search.

David is a salt of the earth type who doesn't care for androids and doesn't see them as sentient beings while Jane is so advanced that she finds herself tortured by her existence as a disposable object of entertainment for humans. It's not quite a love story, but each of them seem drawn to the other by qualities they possess. The movie follows the pair as they solve the mystery of the missing girl, which has a very anti-climactic and unsatisfying conclusion, and gradually open up to one another about their tortured pasts.

The movie ends on kind of a 'meh' note, technically sewing up loose ends but in a very minimal fashion. If sci-fi interests you you might find it an interesting diversion for an hour or two, but probably don't count on it becoming a favorite.

Into the Night (II) (2020–2021)

let em' all burn

[4/10 · 29 September 2021]

If you've ever had the hankering to watch a group of thoroughly unlikeable people snipe at each other, betray each other, scavenge for supplies, snipe at each other some more, and kill a whole bunch of other people whose lives apparently mean less than the main characters, than this is the show for you.

The premise, that daylight is now deadly because the sun is flooding earth with gamma radiation, killing everyone caught outside, is both stupid and the logical equivalent of Swiss cheese. First they suggest that being around during the day is an instant death sentence, regardless of where you are when the sun comes up. That is to say, being underground doesn't help you. Except when it does because the plot demands it, but with some vague explanation that being underground AND underwater is the trick to survival. This is pure nonsense, you might as well just say that ghosts are killing everyone, but that kind of logic abounds on the show.

Plot conveniences abound, from materials and information they require magically presenting themselves just in time to plots against others that require their opponents act in the dumbest way possible always working out...somehow. The episodes are so repetitive that you could practically pick an episode from the two seasons on Netflix at random and see pretty much the same show.

I wouldn't bother investing much time in this.

Shadow in the Cloud (2020)

what's beyond absurd?

[5/10 · 4 September 2021]

This movie is the weirdest, most ridiculous film I've seen in a while. Taking place in 1943 during WWII, the movie opens with the protagonist, a young woman dressed in an Airforce uniform, boarding a military craft as it taxies for take off. She claims to be a mechanic and pilot herself and is carrying a small leather box which she claims contains top secret cargo, and she has orders signed by a high ranking officer ordering the crew to transport her on the flight.

To say that the crew treats her poorly would be a massive understatement. Almost to a man their attitude is deeply hostile and misogynistic, which may or may not be historically accurate, I don't know. It feels over the top, but we are talking about the 1940s so who knows. In any case, for some reason, they claim it's because "all of the stations are full" but this feels like a pretty thin rationale, they order her to relinquish her package and get into the Sperry. For those unfamiliar with WWII military aircraft the Sperry is one of the machine gun turrets on an aircraft that's sort of like a glass bubble welded onto the bottom of the plane. It's a claustrophobic little space with transparent walls and a terrifying view of the open sky beneath where a soldier would sit to fire at enemy aircraft.

While down there she listens on the intercom to some more extraordinarily crude banter from the crew about her before noticing something on the plane which she describes as a "shadow" as well as an enemy aircraft dipping in and out of the clouds near the plane. She warns the crew about both but is quickly dismissed until the aircraft is suddenly attacked. Things escalate quickly as she discovers she can't open the hatch to exit the Sperry and must use the tools available to her to improvise a defense against two enemies.

Eventually the contents of her cargo are revealed as well as her true backstory, which is that her name is Maude and she has a background I won't go into for the sake of spoilers except to say that it isn't what she claimed and that she was seeking to escape a danger.

Around here the action kicks into high gear as Maude tries to survive more attacks on the aircraft. It quickly becomes apparent that this is a movie about female empowerment as she undergoes extreme risk to keep her and her cargo safe, calmly tackling threats while the men often literally cower in terror. It's a little on the nose, but I wouldn't really have a problem with it if they had matched her backstory to her actions. As it is, her actions just don't mesh in the slightest with her backstory; over the course of the film we'll see her display expertise in Airforce combat, perform incredible feats of strength as she maneuvers around the plane, fly the craft under emergency conditions, and fight like Rambo in hand to hand combat against a deadly enemy, none of which are skills suggested by her character's background,

It begs the question of where Maude developed such a wide range of skills. In the movies logic it's simply because she's determined enough to just do it, but of course life just doesn't work that way so it ends up really stretching that suspension of disbelief hard. It also sort of calls into question the reason Maude got onto the plane in the first place. Given that we've seen her fight like a one person army, it begs the question of whether she would have needed to board the aircraft to begin with since it appears there's almost nothing she can't handle personally anyway.

The reality is that her background and her actions in the film are completely disconnected. Her backstory is there to make her relatable and encourage the audience to feel sympathy for her while her superpowers are just what's convenient for conquering all of the threats thrown against her during the film. Chloë Grace Moretz, who plays Maude, is of course famous for her role in the Kick A** films playing a character who should be vulnerable in real life but by virtue of special training is actually far more deadly than she appears. Here though there is no suggestion of a similar background; she just sort of has her superpowers with no real explanation provided. This, combined with an array of stunts that make James Bond look like a wimp, combines to produce moments that are meant to be tense but come off as almost comical instead, including one scene in particular showing her re-entering the plane that is nothing short of pure absurdist fantasy (if you've seen the film you definitely know which scene I'm talking about and if you haven't you'll recognize it immediately when it happens).

In the end, ridiculous or not, the action sequences are mostly nicely shot and the movie has decent pacing that keeps things from getting dull, so the movie isn't painful to watch, just filled with a bunch a scenes that will make you roll your eyes. Acting-wise most of the cast are one dimensional characters and only Ms. Moretz gets much chance to display any range, but her charisma and acting chops are good enough to at least make you root for her, even if you're aware that she's clearly never in any real danger. I'd say it's basically a forgettable flick that you can waste a couple of hours on when you've got some time to kill, but don't go in looking for an instant classic.

Boss Level (2020)

better than I thought it would be

[7/10 · 4 September 2021]

I won't reveal much in this review that you couldn't get from the movies overview description (meaning I don't consider this review to have spoilers), but I will mention some details of the high level plot structure that could allow you to guess events in the film, so if you are particularly spoiler adverse you may want to stop reading.

This movie starts as a typical action film, kind of a poor mans Edge of Tomorrow, with some unknown force causing the protagonist to relive his day over and over until he dies. As per the usual recipe, he tries a number of strategies to deal with his imprisonment like giving in to despair, drowning in booze, killing the bad guys with extreme finesse, etc. It's fun, but nothing the audience hasn't seen many times before.

In the second half of the film the protagonist starts focusing on unraveling the mystery and spending time with his family. The more time he spends, the more he realizes how much his lifestyle has cost him precious moments that he can never truly get back, causing him to grow as a human being. Again, it probably isn't anything the audience hasn't seen before, but for me this is where I started really enjoying the film.

The movie reaches its conclusion after the protagonist solves the mystery and has a moment of personal growth, but must still clear one last hurdle to achieve his happily ever after ending. The fact that the movie doesn't show the audience what happens past a certain point is simply to underscore that it ultimately doesn't matter. The important event was his personal growth; whether he succeeds or fails on the final hurdle is not as important as his realization of what is important in life, which is kind of a nice ending.

I enjoyed the movie; for a low budget action comedy I thought it had some good heart. That said, the movie is full of one-note characters who never grow or change, only the main character experiences any kind of growth or interesting development, with some antagonists so cookie cutter that the main character notes that their monologues don't change no matter the circumstances. But I think sometimes there's only so much you can ask from a film like this, so it didn't bother me overly much. Would I watch this several times? No, but I think you could enjoy it as a fun diversion for a couple of hours.

Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous (2020–2022)

camping, hiking, sailing...and getting eaten by dinosaurs

[8/10 · 28 May 2021]

Welcome to Camp Cretaceous, the most insanely dangerous kids summer camp since that one at Crystal Lake. This animated series follows the adventures of a group of children who land VIP invitations to a dinosaur-themed summer camp at the Jurassic World park. While not initially obvious, it's eventually made clear that the timing of the series aligns with the events of the first Jurassic World movie, meaning that characters and critters from the movie will be referenced or make appearances throughout the episodes.

Being aimed primarily at children, the personalities of the kids are heavily stereotyped tropes like the "nerd", the "Youtube star", the "rich kid", etc., although the series eventually evolves many of them, sometimes with surprisingly adult plotlines. Alongside the traditional themes of making friends and overbearing parental expectations are concepts like parent mortality and poverty. Adding to that, it wouldn't be Jurassic World if things didn't go horribly wrong at the park, and they do. Younger attendees of the park are given shiny sets of plot armor, but there are numerous adults not quite so lucky. There's no gore and the frequency of these events is kept relatively low, but younger viewers should probably have an adult supervising just in case.

Overall the stories are kept largely broad and easily digestible for their target audience at a kind of a dinosaur-themed spooky stories level, with just enough adult material to keep older viewers from being completely bored. The animation is detailed and beautiful and the voice acting competent if a bit over the top. The humor is family friendly and while there is implied violence and scary situations, it should be toned down enough that only very young viewers will have difficulty with it. Bottom line, if they've seen the movies there is nothing here that will be as scary as those so if you let your kids watch he movies they should probably be ok with the series, and if they're not quite ready for the movies but are anxious to see them this should be fine as a gentler introduction.

Stowaway (I) (2021)

great acting, terrible science

[7/10 · 1 May 2021]

I really, really wish Hollywood would put a little more effort into the science part of their science fiction. The impression I get from movies like this is that they sell the movie on the hook, the 30 second pitch that describes what's interesting or unique about the story, and figure that the rest will either work itself out or that no one will care. To an extent I suppose I get it, Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Wars are called science fiction and they couldn't care less about the science end of things, but this isn't really the same kind of movie. This is a movie set in our universe, just a little down the road. There is a real effort to make it seem like this story could actually take place in 50 or 60 years; the ship and the mission are based heavily upon our current space programs and the astronauts' training and education are of the same type that real astronauts have. So with all that effort to make the story fit within our reality, you would think that when they want to introduce story elements that they would make the same effort to make them feel believable. Instead what happens here is that they throw out that reality the moment it becomes inconvenient to plot development. The frustrating thing is that it wouldn't be impossible to have the same basic story without abandoning reality, but instead of putting some thought into it they choose to take the sloppy, easy way to get there instead.

Let's start with the inciting event: an extra, unplanned passenger is stuck with the crew of a long-term mission after it's too late to get him off. The movie states that he was part of the ground crew who had an accident that rendered him unconscious while in a part of the ship that was out of the way and thus went unnoticed until it was too late. How, exactly, is this possible? First of all, crews scour every inch of a ship before launch, testing vital systems and performing inspections and documenting results. Those results are collected and analyzed before a launch is authorized, which means that if he was there he would have been responsible for performing and documenting some of those inspections. They would not just ignore the fact that those results were never reported in. At the very least they would have sent someone else to do the missing inspections, who would have then discovered him. Then there's the whole "hidden" thing. Seeing as he was sealed into a compartment, who sealed him in? Whether he entered from outside the ship or from within, one of those entrances would have had to be open, and someone would have had to close and seal it without noticing the large man hanging a few feet away. And finally, astronauts are sealed inside the ship well before launch while mission control performs all the last minute checks and monitors things like atmospheric conditions. It's not like jumping into your car and turning the key; astronauts sit there on the launchpad for hours even if everything is going perfectly. Add in the time for the launch and the checks from space before they hit the point of no return and you're talking about something like six hours or more. You don't get knocked unconscious for that long unless the injuries are extremely severe and life threatening. If he was out that long he would certainly not have been up and about a day or two later; the odds are good he wouldn't have survived at all without a fully staffed and equipped hospital trying to save his life.

So what could they have done instead? Well, lots of things. For example, a long term mission like that might very well require docking in space with a vessel carrying food, fuel, and other necessities that were collected earlier to avoid having too much weight at liftoff. Maybe he could have been a part of the crew from the supply ship who got stuck there via a series of unfortunate events. Or, a bit more of a stretch but maybe this ship is carrying an experimental stasis chamber to conserve resources on the mission and he somehow got stuck in one of them. Or maybe he was a part of another nations space mission all together whose ship experienced critical failures while on the same journey and they needed to rescue him or let him die. Who knows; the point is that it's possible to create the same basic conditions in a way that's at least feasible.

Other failures of basic scientific logic in the movie include the artificial gravity. Artificial gravity isn't a complex idea at all. It's just centrifugal force. You spin a room around the center of the ship. To people in the room, the floor will push "up" against their feet; the faster the spinning the more force pushing against their feet. At a certain speed the force pushing up will be the same as the force of gravity on earth. Hence artificial gravity. But if you move to the center of the ship or outside the ship, no gravity. So the scene where the astronauts are in space struggling to pull themselves up the ships tower makes no sense whatsoever. With no floor pushing up against them they would be and feel weightless. Worst case scenario they would be floating alongside the ship while the tower spun around, but even that doesn't make much sense because artificial gravity can be stopped. You just stop spinning the room! And we haven't even gotten to talking about why a long term mission wouldn't include replacement or repair parts for critical systems keeping the astronauts alive. Or how the ship could be so low on a critical resource like oxygen. Or how the ships power systems are so exposed that bumping into them could sever all power to the ship and yet somehow aren't affected by a lethally intense radiation storm. The list goes on and on. It makes absolutely zero sense that a multi billion dollar vessel would have so many single points of failure. This ship, the way it's presented, was a deathtrap from before it ever launched!

But if that's all this movie was, just a bunch of plot holes and logical inconsistencies, I would write it off as a bad movie and be done with it. Bad movies are a dime a dozen; there are literally thousands of them. What makes this movie a frustrating loss is that the I really enjoyed the acting. I think the actors nailed their roles. They felt very believable as that unusual combination of high-achieving, motivated, introverted intellectual that I always associate with astronauts. And they play to the drama of the situation really well, with moments like the scene where the captain literally begs to be the one to make a huge sacrifice because she can't bear the thought of forcing someone else to make it in her stead. Or the retreat to cold logic that drives one of the others to demand that someone sacrifice themselves for the sake of the mission, all to hide from his intense feelings of failure and powerlessness that he couldn't find a solution himself. I was never bored watching them despite this being a pretty low key movie, and I never questioned the reality of the characters despite the gaping failures of story logic. In short, I think there was a good movie hiding in there that could have been if they had put some more attention into the design of the story. There are excellent science fiction movies like 'Moon' that don't have big excitement levels but just really good acting and storytelling. It's unfortunate that 'Stowaway' won't be one of them.

Prank Encounters: Mist Demeanor (2021) Season 2, Episode 5

best episode of the season

[9/10 · 29 April 2021]

This should have been either the first or the last episode of the season, because it's the prank that "worked" the best. The setup is that a giant megacorp has been experimenting on things they shouldn't have, and have opened a portal to another dimension that is rapidly leaking a mist that mutates anyone caught in it. The thing to understand is that normal people, when they encounter a scary situation they don't fully understand, tend to have one of two reactions: they freeze, or they run. Neither reaction plays particularly well on camera.

But every once in a while you get someone who is ready to be the action hero. They believe the reality of the prank and they are in it to win it. That is the reaction of the young woman on this episode, and it makes the prank so much more compelling. The other mark, a young man, pretty much just freezes with a worried look on his face but she, she is taking charge. Trying to get everyone rallied for an escape, pulling people back from attacking monsters, she is ready to be the hero. Very fun to watch.

Prank Encounters: Mind Field (2021) Season 2, Episode 4

fun

[7/10 · 29 April 2021]

This episode is as fun to watch for the people watching as for the prank. If you're not familiar with the shows format, they stage elaborate pranks where everyone involved are actors except for the two marks who start at different places but wind up together as the prank reaches its climax. The idea is that with two people brought together seemingly by chance they will help sell the fake reality to each other with their genuine reactions. This prank involves one person being hired by a guy I'll call Mr. Important, a businessman who is taking his team to meet the inventor of a new product. The other prank victim is a guy who's been hired by the inventor of the new product, a machine that reads people's minds.

During the ride over Mr. Important pompously grills everyone in the vehicle about what the most important business aspects of the product are (which they know nothing about yet). No matter what the mark says, which includes such gems as 'what does it cost', Mr. Important agrees and flatters the mark while putting down the others and eventually kicking one of his team to the curb. What's amazing is watching how fast this goes to the mark's head; after just a few minutes of this flattery he picks up a distinct whiff of arrogance in his mannerisms. Meanwhile, the other mark, after seeing a few "demonstrations" of the mind reading machine, including one where it's supposed to be transmitting the scientist's thoughts to his brain but where the machine still has to audibly provide him with the answer (to what he's supposed to be thinking!), opens up after very little prompting to supply that he believes in Astral projection and telekinesis.

The thing is, as funny as it is to watch, these guys are not really that unusual. It's human nature for us to want to believe we're special; we want to be deceived about his, so no matter how ridiculous and obvious it is while watching as an observer many of us would fall for the same flattery trap. And likewise, many of us have beliefs that are completely nuts. Logically, we know they're nuts and so we keep those thoughts to ourselves, but again, in an environment where we're encouraged to speak up without fear of rejection we're only to happy to indulge ourselves because hey, who knows, maybe aliens really did build the pyramids, right?

So eventually, after Mr. Important's team leaves him in the vehicle to make sure there are comfortable chairs and spring water an NO CATS, it's time for the presentation. Both marks participate in the demonstration, never questioning the glaringly obvious ways this could be faked, before the scientist reveals a surprise additional capability of the machine straight out of the mad scientists big book of projects. Things escalate from there, but I don't want to go into details so I'll just say it's pretty funny.

Stargate SG-1: Citizen Joe (2005) Season 8, Episode 15

just...awesome

[10/10 · 19 March 2021]

A fantastic episode guest starring Dan Castellaneta as average guy Joe Spencer from Indiana who starts having visions about the SG1 team. Really he's just watching the show because this is a clip episode, which is normally the absolute worst episode of any shows season, but I have never seen such a creative approach to the concept before, which made it a very enjoyable episode for me.

So, if you were born in the twenty first century, you may not have any idea what a clip episode even is. For a variety of reasons cable and streaming shows don't need to need to make clip shows very often so the idea is slowly disappearing. I don't want to get too into the weeds, but in general terms, when a show is picked up for a season the producers figure out how many episodes there will be and how much it will cost to make each one and that all gets put into a contract: X episodes for Y dollars. But network television contracts have kind of strict requirements. They need to have a large number of episodes per season, typically twenty to twenty five. And each episode has to have a run time within a minute or so of some standard length, so the network can sell ads around it, etc.

Life being unpredictable and all, it's common that shows spend more than they expected to over a long season and realize they need to save money to stay within budget. So they start looking for ways to shoot cheap episodes. Clip shows can often be made at a fraction of a regular episodes cost because they reuse as many assets as they can that have already been paid for. Things like sets, actors, and especially footage. Unfortunately, this usually makes for an unbelievably boring episode, but sometimes creative shows will look to put a little bit of polish on that turd to try and make it fun. I'm happy to say that Stargate found a very entertaining approach; in fact, it worked so well that I didn't even realize it was a clip show until the episode was nearly over!

The episode details how Joe's life gets derailed when he begins having visions (the aforementioned clips) of the thrilling adventures of SG1, his obsession with them eventually causing his life to fall apart. Convinced that there must be some meaning to it all, he tries to track down the team to get some answers. Along the way the show pokes a little fun at itself by having the people in Joe's life critique some of the less successful stories or point out plot holes. It's total fan service, an enjoyable homage to overly obsessive fans that had me laughing the whole time. Observant viewers will realize that there are in-jokes even in the casting of the episode, as SG1s leader Jack O'Neill is a superfan of 'The Simpsons' and Homer in particular who, of course, is voiced by Castellaneta.

The episode wisely avoids getting too dark, quickly defusing even tense scenes and letting the cast react to Joe not as a threat but rather as a slightly odd neighbor you might roll your eyes at, but with a certain amount of affection. Like all clips shows the plot is self-contained and doesn't really contain any story elements that will carry forward but it's funny and relaxed enough that you don't mind. For me the show gets top marks for coming up with such a smart and entertaining way to create a budget episode.

Stargate SG-1: Avenger 2.0 (2003) Season 7, Episode 9

doesn't age well

[5/10 · 17 March 2021]

This is the second go around for an episode focused on the hapless Jay Felger, a researcher at the Stargate program. The first episode with the character, 'The Other Guys', was a decent comedic relief episode about two of the scientists always doing stuff in the background on the show. Jay is a socially awkward nerd who idolizes the SG1 team and daydreams about being the hero in one of their adventures. After some unexpected events, Jay makes a couple of rash decisions that put him and his coworker in harms way but also allow them to face their fears and become heroes for real. It was a little one note, but had enough humor and heart to be fun. Unfortunately, the shows attempt to revisit the concept falls short in a lot of ways.

First, they ditch the coworker and introduce an attractive lab assistant who constantly throws Jay signals that he ignores because he's focused on an infatuation with Carter. I hate this. It's totally cliched, even 20 years ago. Also, the lab assistant who's in love with Jay is completely age inappropriate; she's nearly two decades younger than him. She also works as his subordinate, which even before Me Too wouldn't have been ok with their HR department. And, although I know this probably wouldn't have been something people thought about back when this aired, but the assistant has very little to do other than support her man and be there as a prize when he returns victorious at the end, which just isn't a great message. Watching old shows you have to remind yourself that social norms were different back then, but even so it's hard not to notice how dated these concepts feel today.

Second, the plot revolves around how Jay is actually a smart, nice guy who just lacks belief in himself. To drive the idea that people won't respect you if you don't respect yourself home they have just about everybody react to Jay as though he was something unpleasant they stepped in. But since he is both a highly educated professional at the top of his field and a guy who won a presidential medal of freedom for putting his life on the line to save an SG team, it makes the Stargate program seem like the most hostile place to work in the world. Also, the bumbling, stuttering act gets old pretty quick and should probably have been toned down; a little lack of confidence can be endearing, but an over the top performance pushes the character towards pathetic instead.

Finally, the idea driving the plot, a virus for the Stargate devices, is a little hard to swallow. If you accept the premise then there is essentially no security on the gates; anyone can write their own changes and push them to every device in the galaxy in hours. This seems like an absolutely glaring security problem. There are thousands of these gates, many on worlds with advanced cultures who would prefer not to have backdoors to their planets. And the gates have been around for millions of years. Nobody, not one alien civilization, has had the idea of messing with the logic controlling the gates in all that time? It's a little hard to swallow is all.

So those are my complaints about the episode. I think a lot of the concepts just didn't age very well and overall the premise doesn't entertain as much as the first time around.

Stargate SG-1: Singularity (1997) Season 1, Episode 14

got under my skin

[8/10 · 10 March 2021]

Some spoiler warning. While I will try to be vague, I think that the interesting part of this episode is a no-win situation that arises and in my discussion of it you might very easily figure out key outcomes of the episode that could spoil it for you if you haven't seen it yet, so stop here if you want to go into watching it without any knowledge of what happens in the end.

A traumatized lone survivor, a young girl, is found on a planet. The team brings her back and investigates. Along the way Carter forms a powerful mother-daughter bond with the girl, but soon the team discovers that the people who attacked her settlement also set a trap to use the girl as a weapon. There's plenty of pseudo science mumbo jumbo to explain how the threat escaped their notice until they were painted into a corner, but as absurd as the science is the tactic is, unfortunately, adapted from all too real guerilla warfare techniques. The idea is to exploit any advantage that allows you to inflict damage against your enemy, even if that advantage uses their compassion or humanity against them, and the tactic has a sad history of effective application.

The episode attempts to drive the tragedy home by using an adorable child, bringing our primal drive to protect our young into conflict with our primal drive to live in the hope of creating an impossible to resolve dilemma for Carter. And for the most part it works, right up until the point where the show chickens out and offers an escape to avoid the very dilemma they worked so hard to build. But right up until those final moments I found myself wondering if I wouldn't rather provide whatever comfort I could to a child against the inevitable than be forced to live with the memories of choosing my own survival. It sounds weird to say, but I found myself hoping that I wouldn't choose to survive in that situation, even if my sacrifice would ultimately be meaningless. The thought of abandoning a terrified child to their fate is very nearly as scary to me as becoming another victim of that same fate. One is terrifying but short and ends my life while engaging with the pinnacle of my humanity, while the other is less scary in the immediate sense but would leave me with an endless amount of time to reflect on the selfishness of my choice. That's pretty awful.

But like I said, the show weasels out of its own dilemma at the last moment, opting for a much more palatable outcome in which Carter gets to have her heroic moment and avoid the very cost that makes it heroic, a convenient outcome to say the least. Not that I would rather a darker ending mind you, I want the cheap victory just as much as the show does, but realizing that makes me wonder if I would be capable of the same hard choice in the end. And that, to me, is what makes the episode enjoyable.

That's about it. It's a decent enough self-contained episode that does little to advance the shows mythology but stands well enough on its own.

Evolution (2001)

a solid premise with missed potential

[6/10 · 31 January 2021]

Evolution is a decent goofy Sci-Fi movie about an alien invasion that strikes in the deserts of Arizona. A couple of community college professors discover microscopic life living in a meteor that strikes just outside of town. The catch? The life may be small, but it's complex structure allows it to evolve at billions of times the rate that life on earth does. Soon they and the quirky community they live in are dealing with prehistoric critters rapidly evolving up the ladder towards intelligence, and consuming everything in their path as they do so.

Tl;dr, the film is decent but doesn't reach its full potential, and not all the humor/references in the film have aged gracefully, but if you can watch it for free on one of your streaming subscriptions it's not a bad lazy Sunday movie.

The plot is reasonably interesting for a movie that you've probably never heard of. Part of that is that the movie was released just a few months before 9/11, but even before the national tragedy kind of killed everyone's interest in watching lighthearted comedies for a while the movie wasn't doing especially well. It wasn't bombing, it more or less just broke even in theaters. The problem is it doesn't land its jokes or big scenes very well. I don't know if it's the directing or editing or even the delivery, but a lot of moments that feel like they could have been fun are reduced to a 'meh' feeling.

The comedic timing is often off, causing a lot of the big jokes to fall flat or only hit with a fraction of the energy it seems like they could have. Also, some of the jokes that were highlighted in previews at the time haven't aged well, like a scene in which David Duchovny's character states that he doesn't trust government agent types, a joke that references Duchovny's then-famous role as a government agent in the cultural phenomenon show 'The X-Files' . And finally, some of the cast like Dan Akroyd were clearly just doing someone a favor appearing in the movie and feel a little tacked on as their characters only appear in a few narrow scenes and aren't well integrated with the other characters stories.

All of which is too bad, because if you get past those issues the plot of the movie is pretty original and interesting in a don't-take-it-too-seriously kind of way. Even when they are turning into monsters the critters are usually brightly colored and cute in an alien muppet way, keeping the horror aspects from overwhelming the comedic. And the CGI, while obviously not anywhere near modern levels of quality, is still pretty decent.

The cast is also strong, including many actors who were relative unknowns when the movie was released but would go on to have successful careers. I liked the choice of making Duchovny and Jones scientific wannabees at a community college rather than Ivy league world famous types, which makes their characters more approachable, but I did feel that the movie left Moore a little underused. As the sole legitimate Ivy league world famous type, it might have been more fun to throw the big discoveries about the aliens to her and leave Duchovny and Jones in a more Rosencrantz and Guildenstern type of role, reacting to the big events rather than driving them. I might have also edited out Seann William Scott's role, or at least edited it to make him more integrated into the main characters lives. It seems obvious they wanted him as a third musketeer kind of thing but the connection between him and the professors feels super forced.

So it didn't completely bore me, but it didn't blow me away either. In the end it felt like there was maybe a better movie hiding somewhere in it, but I don't regret rewatching it.

Along Came a Spider (2001)

a school seriously in need of better hiring standards

[6/10 · 13 October 2020]

A US senator's daughter is kidnapped from an upper crust school that caters to the rich and powerful. The kidnapper, a teacher at the school, executes a clever plan to sneak the student past the swarms of armed security and checkpoints, then begins a twisted game of cat and mouse with a detective (Morgan Freeman) with whom he has a fascination, contacting him directly to draw him into the case. The detective teams up with one of the secret service agents (Monica Potter) who worked at the school to try and solve the clues the kidnapper left behind and retrieve the little girl.

While it's not completely awful, this movie struggles at times. The problem is that the movie wants several "twists", surprise reveals ala Sixth Sense, and to get them it has characters behave in ways that strain suspension of disbelief. I can't talk directly about the twists without ruining major plot points, but suffice to say it seems doubtful that the characters could have the motivations they supposedly have without raising some kind of red flag well before the events of the film start.

Once you get past that the movie is a pretty standard crime drama, with the good guys hunting down the bad guys and engaging in big exciting gun battles and car chases until the movie arrives at its predictable outcome. Better movies that Freeman has been in actually manage to surprise in a meaningful way by concluding the story in ways that are genuinely unexpected and have consequences that stay with you after the movie ends. Not that every movie can or should end like Se7en, but a surprise in a film that has little actual impact other than to simply slide characters into new roles within a standard story framework has no long term impact because nothing new has actually happened; the players change but the game is the same.

In any case, the movie isn't terrible, it just isn't anything special. It's the kind of movie you watch on Netflix or whatever some rainy day when there's nothing else better to do and is a mildly entertaining diversion. More interesting than the story, for me anyway, is a glimpse back into life twenty years ago. Phone booths and pre-Windows 95 computers, now that's scary.

American Murder: The Family Next Door (2020)

I wish I never heard of this movie

[8/10 · 7 October 2020]

It's kind of amazing how the modern digital life is so extensively documented that a clever team of editors can take your social media accounts and the videos off your phone and make a fairly comprehensive movie of your life even after you've gone. That's what happened here; the production team assembled a detailed accounting of the lives of a family that experienced an unspeakable tragedy. By the end of the film you have a sense that you know these people, which is also part of the problem: the more you find yourself caring, the harder it will be to keep watching.

I really struggled with the foregone conclusion that was the lives of this family. Some things are so horrible my brain just doesn't want to accept them. I watched the movie in fits, drawn on by morbid curiosity but forced to continuously stop by some childish part of my brain that believed that if I simply stopped watching then somehow the remaining unseen events of the film would be trapped in a time bubble that couldn't proceed until I did. If only life worked that way. I never did make it to the very end of the movie because I just never want to hear the full detail of certain events.

The movie is well made, but painful to watch. I'll admit to a certain amount of tears, and a sincere wish that I'd never heard of the Watts family. I will never understand why certain people fought to remove the application of the death penalty; if I had those memories floating around my skull, I would think death would be my best friend. Instead I'll just hope certain people are around for a long, long time, getting visited every single damn day by others who know what this person did to kids.

Evil (2019–2024)

occasionally scary, but mostly just nonsense

[5/10 · 4 October 2020]

'Evil' is a show about angels and demons and a team of investigators trying to filter "real" demonic activity from those workaday demonic pranks that people are always playing on each other. Each episode starts with something that looks like demonic or angelic activity, then the team starts picking everything apart looking for non-supernatural explanations, and by the end they usually find explanations for some of the stuff but leave some events open to interpretation. I mean, I say interpretation, but really the show heavily implies that demons are in fact a thing and that those nasty buggers are practically everywhere. Playing a game with someone over the Internet? That's almost certainly a demon. That smart speaker in the kitchen? All the answers are fed by demons! A virtual reality game? Oh man, that thing is chock full of demons just waiting to steal your kids souls with rock and roll music and Ouija boards.

Normally I wouldn't care much about how a show presents supernatural elements, but I do have a problem with the format here. Typically a show with supernatural aspects develops it's mythology and story arcs with villains and battles in a way that makes it obvious that it's all fiction for fun and entertainment. The shadowy approach they use here of avoiding definitive answers and one discovery opening the door to another mystery that is left open-ended and unresolved feels like they're trying to convince people to embrace the idea that it might all be real on some level. It's almost like they want to say "see, science can't always explain this stuff."

I mean, I can't say for sure that that's what they're aiming for, but they do seem to push that the-church-is-the-best-defense-against-evil notion pretty hard, which, I don't know, seems kind of not right given the actual evil we've seen associated with churches in the last few decades. And honestly, I think that's what really bugged me watching this: it felt like an advertisement for the Catholic church. The whole pedophile priest thing is brought up, but then quickly dismissed, and meanwhile one of the main characters is a priest in training and the church is funding our heroes on their quest for justice and only the artifacts and rituals of the Catholic faith keep the demons at bay, etc.

The other thing I'll point out is that the shows comprehension of how technology and other aspects of the modern world work is very in line with your parents or grandparents world view. A "deep fake" can basically do anything and is completely indistinguishable from reality, your smart speakers are all being hacked by young people who don't like you, computer games are trying to trick kids into embracing Satan, you get the idea. They use a lot of ideas borrowed from the real world, but only a very surface level understanding of the subject and with an older value system applied to the interpretation.

On the more positive side, I will say that although I may not love a lot of aspects of the show, I do have to admit one thing, which is that even if it's a little too associated with a particular faith, shadowy demonic activity can be scary. I mean, not always, the home visitation demon was so ridiculous that I literally laughed out loud, but some of the stuff involving demons hunting kids was genuinely terrifying. I found it a bit hit or miss though, and with WAY too much emphasis on the demons always wanting to chat with you about their nefarious plans. I mean, if demons existed and were this chatty, they wouldn't be even remotely secret. There'd be daytime talk show episodes with titles like 'how to talk to your kids about the demons trying to steal their souls'. And, of course, all of this supernatural stuff can distract from the scariest truth, which is that we don't need demons at all to have evil. We walk that path just fine without any guidance from the light of the morning star.

So bottom line I wouldn't say this is a good show. I watched the first four episodes and will probably stop there. Yes, it was occasionally scary, but mostly it was just stupid.

Breaking Bad: Felina (2013) Season 5, Episode 16

perfection

[10/10 · 3 October 2020]

Another show I like once had some voice over dialogue that said "endings are hard", and I think that concisely captures the difficulty in bringing a long form piece of entertainment like a television show to an end. The great thing about television is that it lets you explore a full, rich story that couldn't otherwise be captured by the two hour running time of a movie. The down side is that bringing a hundred plus hours of story to a graceful conclusion that both ties off all the major loose threads and feels true to the spirit of the show and its characters is super difficult, as evidenced by how few shows get it right. The ones that do, like 'Newhart' or 'Six Feet Under' get talked about forever. It becomes a cultural phenomenon that people talk about and enjoy for years.

This finale for 'Breaking Bad' may be the single best ending I have ever seen. I can still very clearly remember watching the ending of 'Six Feet Under' and being impressed, but by comparison to this it was amateurish. I don't know if it was genius or luck or the hand of god, but even now, years after the show has ended, I watch this episode and get chills. When those first few bars of 'Baby Blue' start, a song which so many people have heard a million times, it zaps you like a shock with the realization of how PERFECT the song is to close out the story, just as that first line rolls out:

"Guess I got what I deserve."

It works on so many levels of the story that it feels like divine providence. This song was somehow made for the conclusion of this story, even if that's impossible. And that is the simple cherry on top of an amazing sundae that gives the audience closure on all the main characters and let's us truly say "the end", even if we can't also say "happily ever after". Vince Gilligan and his team have created nothing short of a masterpiece that I'm pretty sure will be remembered in 'best of' lists for decades. If you're reading this then I think you probably agree, but if by some chance you haven't watched the series do yourself a favor and binge this bit*h right away.

Haven: Audrey Parker's Day Off (2011) Season 2, Episode 6

not the best episode of Haven

[6/10 · 29 September 2020]

Haven has a strong MotW formula that they adhere to pretty closely. The "troubles" allow them to basically introduce crazy new elements every week and usually resolve them by the end of the episode. But formulaic doesn't necessarily mean bad, at least not in my book. It just depends on how well the formula is executed. Unfortunately, this 'Groundhog Day' inspired episode made me groan because of a number of cliches that I tend to hate in the repeating day genre.

The one that drives me crazy the fastest is the "there's no time" cliche. A character knows something bad is going to happen and they're about to dash off to stop it. But wait! Before they can do that they have to get this other character, who doesn't know what's going on, to do something. "No time to explain," they say, "you just have to trust me." Except, well, there IS time. Plenty of it, in fact, for the character to lay out the broad strokes of what's happening. It's just that the writer's don't want the other characters to know, so that inevitably those characters can wander into harms way like lost sheep and the hero can shake their fists at the sky and yell "noooo!" Will the day continue to reset or did a main cast member demand too much in contract negotiations? Tune in to find out!

Another cliche that kind of bugs me is the 'this is how it ends' repeating day. You'd be surprised how often this gets used in 'Groundhog Day' stories. Basically, the writers intend to end a romance in this episode, and they want to use the repeated scene element of the story to show the gradual realization that the relationship isn't working. The scenes start with romance and lovers gazing into each other's eyes, but each new cycle introduces an off note to their interactions until finally by the end the relationship is over. It sounds like a cool storytelling technique until you realize that by the nature of the plot only one of the two can be growing between scenes. So one character has learned something about themselves and grown a little and seen that there are problems in the relationship that they don't know how to overcome, while the other person wakes up one day with their romantic partner saying "sorry, I think it's best if we don't see each other anymore." It's just a little harsh, is my point.

The last thing I'll say is that I didn't love the resolution of the story line, which involved a person with a mental disorder. Although I'm certain it was unintentional, it felt a little like the message was 'better to leave than burden those you love with your condition.' Again, I'm sure that's not what they intended, but it certainly felt a little like that to me, which left me feeling a little unsettled.

Anyway, the bottom line for me is that this is a middling episode of Haven. It's kind of a one-off, they don't really explore much of the shows mythology in it, and it feels a little more like housecleaning for future episodes than a decent stand-alone plot.

Return to Sender (I) (2015)

bring a bucket of brain bleach

[2/10 · 26 September 2020]

This isn't a good movie. It's about a woman who experiences a horrifying trauma and loses her effing mind. The first 30 minutes or so establish her as someone who has a touch of OCD or is maybe a bit on the spectrum before the inciting event occurs and changes her life. Unfortunately, the event is shown in graphic detail, which I frankly wish had not been the case because I felt nauseous afterwards for several hours. I cannot overstate how graphic and ugly the scene is.

Anyway, after what happens happens, she begins acting in an extremely unusual way, which worries her friends and family. I'm not entirely sure what the movie was aiming for, exactly, as there is not really any big reveal or surprise that wasn't shown in detail on the movie box, so there really isn't any tension. Even if they didn't give away the store on the movie cover, it should be extremely obvious to any viewer exactly what she's doing. The only people who don't know what's going on are the other characters in the movie, because otherwise everything would fall apart.

Even after the climactic moments of the film are over, the movie ends feeling a little like they just ran out of funds and had to stop filming. There isn't really an end so much as just a fade to black with a bunch of loose threads left unresolved. I got this movie by accident; Amazon sent me this movie instead of the movie I actually ordered, and didn't bother to even ask for it back because shipping was more than the film was worth, but even free I regret losing the time I spent watching it. Do not watch this film.

Elementary: Solve for X (2013) Season 2, Episode 2

some details correct, some wrong

[8/10 · 15 September 2020]

A mathematician is killed and Sherlock discovers some mysterious math equations written in hidden ink on his walls. As he and Watson investigate, they discover that the slain mathematician and an unknown partner were working on the P vs NP problem. The show posits that someone has solved it, and the solution is the driving MacGuffin of the episode. I have to give the show credit for getting the essential details of the P vs NP problem and its implications correct. That said, I do have two quibbles with the plot.

First, no mathematician writes their work in paint on their walls. It's not remotely secure, even if you do need a UV light source to see it, and mathematicians are just like regular folk; they don't always get everything perfect the first time, so writing your work on your walls with paint would be madness. But I get that really the producers just liked the effect of hidden writing appearing on the wall and it's a minor detail so no big deal.

A much bigger deal is the solution they posit. Without getting too into the messy details, the P vs NP problem has two potential solutions. One solution would prove that P = NP while the other would prove P != NP. The show goes with someone finding a solution that is P = NP, which would essentially upend life as we know it on earth, and that's not an exaggeration. If P = NP, the solution proving it would necessarily involve showing how to solve a massive collection of related problems that would effect everything from cryptography to artificial intelligence to your weather forecast. Virtually every mathematician and computer scientist I have ever met, myself included, believes that P != NP, and that if the P vs NP problem does have a solution, it would be one proving the opposite of what they depict in the episode. I get that it facilitated what they wanted for the plot but it still feels a little sloppy, especially how they hand wave it away at the end by having he NSA "seize" everything so that they don't have to deal with the implications down the road.

To me it's a bit like they had an episode where Sherlock and Joan discover that there is real alchemy that can turn lead into gold, and at the end of the episode having found the secret recipe before the bad guys Sherlock says something like "I've put the secret recipe in my bank deposit box and we shall never discuss making more gold again, Watson." I mean, yah, you can write whatever, but who's not going to believe that people would level cities to get their hands on that recipe, right? A solution to P vs NP where P = NP would be like that, but worth much, much more. So a decent episode, with an asterisk that most people will probably not notice or care about; like an excellent meal at a restaurant with one tiny flaw that you can pick at all night. Just the way I like it.

Away (2020)

not how things work

[6/10 · 5 September 2020]

This show dramatizes the first manned mission to Mars. The international crew is led by an American but includes a number of astronauts from other countries, including China and Russia. Even before they depart there are rumbles about why an American is captain of the mission, and almost immediately upon arriving at the missions staging facility on the moon the Chinese and Russian astronauts are conspiring, sowing dissent, and generally acting like a-holes with an agenda.

Here's the thing, although I will admit that I don't know how the first manned mission to Mars will actually go, this setup flies in the face of every lick of common sense. First of all, they make it clear that the United States largely paid for the mission. It's frankly hard to see how any country, US or otherwise, would willingly share the glory of such an historic achievement unless they had absolutely no other choice. That means any nation represented on the crew would almost certainly have serious skin in the game, financial and otherwise. Nobody is saying "hey, I know we just spent a trillion dollars building the infrastructure to do this amazing thing, but in the spirit of international cooperation we should give up some of the glory for the warm fuzzies we'll get inviting these other nations to join us." So whoever is there is from a nation that has a vested interest in the appearance of success. They are not going to risk their reputation by putting someone up there who's going to make them look bad.

Second, being an astronaut is kind of like being a soldier. Every member of the crew must rely on every other crew member with absolute faith. Space is so insanely deadly that anything less is practically suicidal. That means that by the time you've selected a crew, they have been run through a battery of every conceivable psychological test and training method to ensure that they work well as a team. Is it possible someone could hide their hidden agenda and fool everyone? Sure, it's possible. Is it likely? Not even remotely.

Third, while it is possible that mission control would have backups in the event that someone on the crew had to drop out of the mission, it would be backup teams, not individuals, except for the most unusual of circumstances. Crews for long term missions like this are trained in groups so that they work together as perfectly as possible. You don't just replace crew members because of whoever is winning a popularity contest on that day. If you discover a serious issue that could affect the team cohesion, you swap out the entire team. There is no margin for error out there and you don't gamble with those kinds of unknowns.

And finally, among the many things considered during the selection process is the candidates personal situation. That means, among other things, they would have required candidates to think about things like illness or death in the family, marital status, etc. I 100% guarantee you that no candidate makes it through selection without the commitment to put the mission before everything else in their lives. While I understand that they want to make things exciting with big dramatic scenes and all, one of the characters has a reaction to some bad news that, if I was NASA, would chill my blood. Astronauts need to be the kind of people that are rock solid under pressure. They're human, sure, but they don't have big emotional outbursts or casually question their commitment to the mission. And I get the feeling that they are going to make this a theme throughout the run, which doesn't feel authentic to me.

If the show was set at some distant point in the future or something where being an astronaut is a more common job, I could maybe feel better about the choices they made with respect to people's personalities. Apart from the team dynamics, the show makes a nice effort to get some of the technical details right, like the idea of using water from the moon in the hull to act as radiation shielding. The problem is that this is supposed to be the near future, which makes the show feel way too soap opera-y to me. I like Hillary Swank, I think she's a great actor, but three seasons of the best of humanity scheming and plotting while they attempt to set a milestone in human civilization doesn't seem very enjoyable to me. Maybe it wouldn't make good television, but I just don't think the first crew to Mars should have to learn to get along with each other during the mission, that should be a given. The focus should be on their mission, but maybe that's just not exciting enough.

Justified: Shot All to Hell (2014) Season 5, Episode 5

missing scene?

[8/10 · 2 September 2020]

'Justified' had a format to its seasons that it adhered to pretty closely. Early in a season, usually in the first episode, there's an inciting event. Something that kicks off a whole series of moves by the main characters that play out over the course of the season until the full repercussions play out by the end of the final episode. It's a matter of preference, but I've always enjoyed the back half more than the first half as the season builds towards its climactic moments. Mid-season episodes like this one are where they typically thin the herd of seasonal players a bit and highlight the big life events and personal growth of Boyd and Raylen, who are of course the Yin and Yang stars of the show. Although those weren't always my favorite, this episode is quite good, with big moments for both men that really highlight who they are becoming: peeling back the facade of Boyd's country charm to reveal his ever darker core and Raylen's struggle to avoid the same fate by embracing the more difficult path of his boss and surrogate father figure Art instead of accepting the inheritance of the biological father he despised.

They also establish a story element in this episode that is one of my favorite payoffs of the entire show that has to do with the so-called "twenty one foot rule". It doesn't pay out until the end of the season, but it is one of the absolute funniest moments of the show for me. As I was re-watching the episode it also occurred to me that there was some additional humor to be had in scenes not in the episode. There was a web show called 'Cracked After Dark' that was a kind of pop culture commentary thing. They had a game called "scenes that must have happened", with the idea of looking at a moment in a movie that's played for comedic or dramatic effect and realizing there must have been an awkward scene not shown that made the scene in the movie possible.

An example would be the punch that turns into a hug scene between Solo and Lando in 'Empire Strikes Back', where the web series talked about how the two men must have agreed to do the bizarre greeting at some point in the past. Of course, the Solo movie eventually attempted to explain that, but you get the idea. Anyway, there's a scene in this episode that made me think of that. It involves someone making a power move to seize control followed by a dramatic reveal by the other individual. It's a fun scene, which I probably can't fully detail without having to throw the spoiler switch, but my thought when watching was how weird the second reveal would have been to plan. Thinking about how it must have gone down made me laugh; I think if you watch the episode you'll know what I'm referring to.

All in all a good watch, with a nice blend of humor and drama. Worth watching again if you find yourself missing the cowboy from Kentucky and have access to Hulu.

Rust Valley Restorers (2018– )

great show

[9/10 · 27 August 2020]

I'm not a car guy. Fact is, I'm about as far as you can get from car guy. But even though I may not understand about 75% of the jargon they use, this show is still fun to watch. The secret is passion; seeing something through the eyes of someone who loves it makes almost anything engaging. So, even if you aren't into cars I'd recommend giving this a watch, if for nothing else than to watch the transformation of a rusty piece of junk into a piece of living history.

Million Dollar Beach House (2020)

feel better about your non-million dollar house

[6/10 · 26 August 2020]

So just starting with the obvious; this is a reality show that follows a group of realtors who work with really, really expensive homes in the Hamptons. A single commission on one of these homes is probably many times your annual salary, so needless to say it's an incredibly competitive field where realtors might spend tens of thousands staging a home to appeal to a particular type of buyer like "Wall Street financier" or "tech geek" and showing a home might involve throwing a beach party so that perspective buyers can see what it would be like if it was their house.

Fair warning, this gets a little long and rambling, so just jump to the last paragraph for the tl;dr.

According to the show, 80% of the homes in these high end markets are basically vacation homes for one percenters, so the home owners tend to be of a type. Wealthy, of course, but also used to being catered to and pampered. Polite, but in that polite society 'I'm going to smile to your face and talk about you behind our back' kind of way. Basically your stereotypical entitled rich person.

The realtors on the other hand, they're....well, they're just the worst. Being entitled is the natural state of being for rich people, but the realtors aren't rich, just wannabe rich. But dealing closely with wealth and privilege can cause those who wish they were wealthy and privileged to act as though it's all but a done deal that they will be themselves soon enough. They've met rich people and realized that rich people are just plain old humans; they compare those people with themselves and figure 'hey, why not me; I'm just as good looking and smart' and so on. Before you know it someone who barely graduated from high school will happily lecture others on, say, investment strategy, with supreme confidence.

There are, however, some interesting moments in the show. Beyond just the house porn, that is. One thing that you get to observe is how high-value properties are sold. Beyond a certain price, the value of an extremely high-end home is open to a certain amount of interpretation. Traditional real estate uses "comps", or comparables, to set a value range for a property. Age of the building, acreage, square feet, construction quality and material, etc. But that generally works because you can find other properties with similar qualities and observe what they sold for. With luxury properties it's not as easy because there isn't an agreed upon list of features with known values. What's the value of being on the beach? How about an amazing view? Or a unique architectural design?

This comes up in an episode where a home is being listed for $35 million. As is common in these kind of markets, realtors at the firm will help close a coworkers listing by reaching out to their contacts to see if they know a potential buyer. If their contact buys the building, they have some agreed upon split of the commission between the listing agent and the buyer's agent. But it's a little more complicated than just closing a sale. A realtor acting as the seller's agent has a little pull in swaying the home owner towards a bid, but they also have their reputation at stake. Push a seller towards a bad offer to make a sale and it might work or it might anger the seller, who stops seeing the realtor as "on their side". This is of particular value in the insular world of people who own multi-million dollar homes.

In the episode, one of the realtors is the listing agent for the $35 million home, a home he helped the owners purchase a few years back. One of the other realtors wants to bring in one of her contacts to get a walk through. It turns out her contact is a young man who himself represents a range of clients. However, she's picking at the price even before her contact has seen it. And sure enough, her contact also comes in with the intention of picking away at the price by "neg-ing".

Neg-ing is where the intermediary comes in and looks for problems or reasons why the property isn't that great with an overall goal of lowering the price, usually because the intermediary gets paid by saving their client money. This is a bit of a judgement call because wealthy buyers do often have representatives that check certain details, but one of the classic neg-ing hallmarks is asking insanely detailed questions that have less to do with checking the quality of the building than they do with developing a list of all the supposedly important features the property doesn't have to use as part of your argument when you start negotiating on price.

In the episode the intermediary asks whether the headboard on the bed has charging jacks built into it, implying that newer headboards often do. Just try to imagine, if you will, a buyer looking for a home in the $30 million+ range, and try to estimate how the charging jacks in the headboard will factor in importance to their purchasing decision. It's all a trick anyway; if the headboard had had jacks he would have said something about how most wealthy home owners wouldn't want the fine woodwork of the headboard marred by cheap phone jacks.

The episode presents the listing agent realtor as being in the wrong because he's kind of pompous (because he's the worst) in his interactions with the other realtors contact. But I suspect his attitude stemmed from the fact that his instincts were telling him something was off when she started picking so aggressively at the price. In truth, I rather suspect that the realtor for the neg-ing guy likely only uses this contact for when she's not the listing agent or she believes the seller won't give her any repeat business (estate sale, etc.) because she's also the worst. She doesn't care if the other realtor damages his relationship with the homeowners, and neither, frankly, does the real estate agency, since they can just replace him if his contacts run dry. Just a little tip if you are ever selling your home; unless you have to sell quickly for some reason it's usually financially better for you to leave a home on the market a little longer than to accept a low-ball offer, even if your agent is pressuring you to accept the offer. Statistics show that realtors selling their own homes tend to leave them on the market a couple months longer and get something like an average of $10000 more (according to Steven Levitt, I believe).

Bottom line, you probably won't identify very well with the people on the show unless you happen to be someone in the privileged position of being able to purchase one of these homes. If that's the case then congratulations and if you've enjoyed this review I'd really love to use your vacation home during the off season if you're just leaving it to sit around empty. Otherwise prepare yourself for a lot of very privileged people who don't think they're privileged, even as they shop for multi-million dollar homes they will use for something like four weeks out of the year. The homes are gorgeous because of course they are, truly top notch real estate porn, but it's cheap enough to watch and dream.

Upload (2020– )

funny, then depressing

[7/10 · 25 August 2020]

'Upload' explores a quasi-dystopian future where people who expect to die soon can choose to upload their consciousness into a virtual world where they can, in theory, live forever in a perfect digital world. After the protagonist Nathan, a young idealistic programmer and entrepreneur, is badly injured in a suspicious car crash he reluctantly gives in to the wishes of his overbearing girlfriend to sign a contract that moves him into 'Lakeview', one of the more upper crust virtual worlds. After Nathan wakes up in his new reality, however, he quickly discovers that the world is more slick corporate brochure ideal than actual experience ideal.

For example, although the monthly "housing" fee comes with a roster of included perks, Nathan quickly discovers that the virtual experience is built with a nearly endless onslaught of opportunities for convenience charges like expensive virtual food in your rooms minibar, ad bots constantly trying to sell you gum and other impulse purchases, virtual clothing, and expensive equipment for leisure activities. In fact, if you are observant you quickly realize that the virtual world is carefully constructed so that residents have little choice but to either spend money or sit around in absolute boredom.

This is a depressingly accurate depiction of the so-called "freemium" model that has dominated gaming over the last decade, particularly mobile gaming, where designers will go so far as to introduce "frustration events"; artificially created obstacles designed to interfere with a user's experience during key moments that can be circumvented with an in-app purchase. A dated but excellent example would be the game 'Candy Crush', which has been broken down by analysts to show that the game presents the illusion of skill-based game play but actually operates much closer to a slot machine.

Nathan's experience is further diminished by his girlfriend Ingrid, who refuses to give him her account password, required for any in-world purchases, opting instead to forward all of his purchase requests to her so that she can "feel closer to him" by monitoring his every activity. Since her family account also pays his virtual rent, she also wields an ominous power over his very existence, which she is not shy about reminding him whenever he seems on the verge of refusing one of her requests.

As if all of that wasn't bad enough, residents of the virtual world suffer further indignities they may not even be aware of. Privacy, for example, is shown to be non-existent as 'Lakeview' employees can and frequently do observe residents without their knowledge whenever they please for reasons as benign as checking up on a residents mental health to simple entertainment or for free adult entertainment, with the resident's "privacy mode" having no impact on this ability whatsoever. Even the resident's minds are fair game, with 'Lakeview' employees having the ability to force residents to sleep, shuffle through and add or remove memories, or suspend their mind altogether if, for example, a resident has insufficient funds to pay for the higher "unlimited data" package.

Conditions are so poor that the virtual world routinely has a 40%+ "rejection rate", which amounts to residents committing suicide, something that the company is desperate to avoid until it has extracted the last of a resident's funds. In other words, conditions can be made tolerable for those with enough money, but when the funds run out the company has the ability to drop a resident into a hellish version of the virtual world where every comfort, even those that cost the company nothing to maintain like the view from your window, are removed. Anyone who has had a family member in a nursing home will be unable to miss the parallels, as nursing home chains utilize a similar model between medicare and medicaid facilities.

Perhaps the one bright spot in Nathan's life is Nora, an "angel", the company term for customer service reps, whom he befriends. Nora inducts Nathan into the virtual world and takes a deeper interest in him after she talks him out of committing suicide shortly after arriving at 'Lakeview'. Nora and Nathan bond over their general distaste for the unfairness of the world, real and virtual, and the tendency of the modern digital world to encourage short, artificial interactions between people.

The show is a comedy and the humor, though frequently dark, usually hits the mark. Unfortunately, for me it might have hit the mark a little too well. The first few times they made jokes about in-app purchases or lack of privacy I laughed, but as the show wore on it started to feel distressingly authentic. Some of the technologies, like scanning a human brain to make a digital copy, are pure fantasy. But much of the technology in the show is well thought out, so that it feels like an organic advancement of today's technology. But that authentic feeling started feeling claustrophobic as time went on, painting a picture of the future that was at once alien and familiar, and not at all happy.

The wonders of the Internet and the digital age have brought us amazing conveniences, but the ruthless efficiency of Silicon Valley style commerce feels very much like it could create this dystopian world of tomorrow where relationships are arranged by apps and our social lives are rated on a one to five star system. Where amazing virtual reality systems allow us to step inside our favorite movies and books but also also bring us work environments that utilize eye tracking cameras to alert management when our attention isn't focused on our work. And where the entertainment distractions we desperately need to avoid dwelling on our worsening living conditions are riddled with opportunistic barriers to enjoyment until we fork over additional funds.