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dolorosa_12(Not because nothing has happened, but simply because I do not have the energy to keep up.)
I don't normally log TV viewing in the way I do books read, but I've watched so many shows recently — beloved old favourites finishing forever, perennials returning for another batch of episodes, new things popping up on my radar — that I felt I had to write a little bit about each one.
Killjoys
I watched the series finale for this a couple of days ago. There was a lot to wrap up, but I think for the most part it struck the right tone, and stuck the landing. Even though the stakes had got higher and higher each season, the show never forgot that at its heart it was a tongue in cheek space opera about found family, and that was the note on which it ended.
Carnival Row
This one was a pick by Matthias, and I found it mostly frustrating. I loved the setting — secondary world steampunk in a city where supernatural creatures are grudgingly allowed to live among humans — but it had one of my least favourite tropes: discrimination against supernatural beings used as a metaphor for real-world discrimination against refugees (the version of this trope where it's a metaphor for real-world racism or homophobia is intensely annoying too). In Carnival Row, as in almost every instance of this trope I can think of, the majority of the supernatural characters are played by white actors, which just adds to the irritation. I think the show might have worked if they'd embraced the silly whimsy of the setting, making it more like Jupiter Ascending or something like that, rather than feeling they needed to be gritty and serious and make important points about current treatment of refugees and migrants.
Elementary
We're approaching the final episode (the UK gets things slightly later than in the US, hence the delay), and I'm not ready to say goodbye!
Peaky Blinders
The fifth season just finished up, and I think, for the most part, it was an improvement on the two preceding (although at this point I can't see them improving on the first, flawless season). At its best, this show is a fascinating exploration of toxic masculinity, the ways women work around it, and the depths of damage a deeply traumatised individual will do to himself and everyone around him to ensure he never feels afraid ever again. At its worst, the show kills off or shunts aside its most interesting characters to focus on extraneous new male characters and their manpain. Season 5 was a mix of both.
Warrior
This show completely passed me by, but Matthias heard about it on a TV podcast, and we binged the entire thing in about a week before it was taken off the streaming service on which it had been hosted. Honestly, I'm not sure why it didn't seem to get more attention: it's a fantastically tropey martial arts/gangster/western mashup, set in 19th-century San Fransisco, with most of the characters being Chinese migrants facing racism and hostility, and finding ways to survive in a city which both wants their (cheap) labour and wishes they weren't there. There are a lot of gloriously stylised fight scenes, people walking melodramatically in slow motion, and in one episode the writers took an incredibly contrived excuse, seemingly just so that they could write an episode which consisted entirely of a bar fight. I loved it a lot.
Matthias has gone out to meet up with a friend from the US who was a visiting scholar in our former academic department in the year I did my MPhil, but I decided to stay at home and just rest a bit. I've spent the morning doing yoga, housework, and reading every Vasya/Morozko fic (in the Winternight trilogy fandom) on Ao3. This evening is the alumni event for my old department (this weekend is alumni weekend in Cambridge), so I'll head out to be sociable in a few hours' time. Tomorrow will be more socialising — spending the afternoon in Ely withnotasapleasure, her husband, and a couple of their friends. All in all, it should be a good weekend.
I don't normally log TV viewing in the way I do books read, but I've watched so many shows recently — beloved old favourites finishing forever, perennials returning for another batch of episodes, new things popping up on my radar — that I felt I had to write a little bit about each one.
Killjoys
I watched the series finale for this a couple of days ago. There was a lot to wrap up, but I think for the most part it struck the right tone, and stuck the landing. Even though the stakes had got higher and higher each season, the show never forgot that at its heart it was a tongue in cheek space opera about found family, and that was the note on which it ended.
Carnival Row
This one was a pick by Matthias, and I found it mostly frustrating. I loved the setting — secondary world steampunk in a city where supernatural creatures are grudgingly allowed to live among humans — but it had one of my least favourite tropes: discrimination against supernatural beings used as a metaphor for real-world discrimination against refugees (the version of this trope where it's a metaphor for real-world racism or homophobia is intensely annoying too). In Carnival Row, as in almost every instance of this trope I can think of, the majority of the supernatural characters are played by white actors, which just adds to the irritation. I think the show might have worked if they'd embraced the silly whimsy of the setting, making it more like Jupiter Ascending or something like that, rather than feeling they needed to be gritty and serious and make important points about current treatment of refugees and migrants.
Elementary
We're approaching the final episode (the UK gets things slightly later than in the US, hence the delay), and I'm not ready to say goodbye!
Peaky Blinders
The fifth season just finished up, and I think, for the most part, it was an improvement on the two preceding (although at this point I can't see them improving on the first, flawless season). At its best, this show is a fascinating exploration of toxic masculinity, the ways women work around it, and the depths of damage a deeply traumatised individual will do to himself and everyone around him to ensure he never feels afraid ever again. At its worst, the show kills off or shunts aside its most interesting characters to focus on extraneous new male characters and their manpain. Season 5 was a mix of both.
Warrior
This show completely passed me by, but Matthias heard about it on a TV podcast, and we binged the entire thing in about a week before it was taken off the streaming service on which it had been hosted. Honestly, I'm not sure why it didn't seem to get more attention: it's a fantastically tropey martial arts/gangster/western mashup, set in 19th-century San Fransisco, with most of the characters being Chinese migrants facing racism and hostility, and finding ways to survive in a city which both wants their (cheap) labour and wishes they weren't there. There are a lot of gloriously stylised fight scenes, people walking melodramatically in slow motion, and in one episode the writers took an incredibly contrived excuse, seemingly just so that they could write an episode which consisted entirely of a bar fight. I loved it a lot.
Matthias has gone out to meet up with a friend from the US who was a visiting scholar in our former academic department in the year I did my MPhil, but I decided to stay at home and just rest a bit. I've spent the morning doing yoga, housework, and reading every Vasya/Morozko fic (in the Winternight trilogy fandom) on Ao3. This evening is the alumni event for my old department (this weekend is alumni weekend in Cambridge), so I'll head out to be sociable in a few hours' time. Tomorrow will be more socialising — spending the afternoon in Ely with
notasapleasure, her husband, and a couple of their friends. All in all, it should be a good weekend.