Quaran-TV, part 12
Aug. 9th, 2021 12:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12This TV watching log covers shows watched in July, and the first bit of August.
Wynonna Earp's final season finally found a home on a UK streaming service, which meant that we were able to watch it after waiting a year! I believe this season came as a bit of a shock to the showrunners, and they decided to reward their small — but vocal and devoted — fanbase with pure fanservice. The show was always deeply silly, but this time they dialled things up to eleven. I loved it.
Lucifer is another deeply silly show resurrected on a new platform after an apparant cancellation. This latest season dropped a lot of the case of the week stuff in favour of a longer arc involving a war to inherit the role of God, and lots of celestial family drama, and I'm not sure this was the best approach. Lucifer is one of the few shows where I want monster-of-the-week plots rather than serialised television, and although I still enjoyed the character interactions it wasn't my favourite season of the show.
Lupin's second half was a delight from start to finish. Omar Sy is brilliant in the role (although I have to laugh at the fact that all his heists succeed on the basis that he's someone no one notices — he has such presence that in real life he'd be impossible to miss!), I adore all the supporting characters, and I only wish that we were getting more of the show!
The third of the shows about trickster gods with names beginning with 'L' is Loki. I know a lot of people in my Dreamwidth circle liked this, and I don't like to devote lots of space disparaging things that friends enjoyed, so I shall simply say that I really, really disliked this. My favourite Marvel film is Ragnarok, with the first Thor film a very close second, so to say I was disappointed in the show is an understatement.
For something completely different, the Icelandic Netflix show Katla is a complete shift in tone. It's set in a small village near the eponymous volcano, which has been erupting constantly for over a year, covering the area with ash and rendering it virtually uninhabitable. The only remaining residents are those too stubborn to leave, too traumatised and haunted by events in their past to sever their connection with the area, or those stuck there in order to carry out scientific research. The plot reminds me somewhat of the French show Les Revenants, in which dead family members and neighbours of the inhabitants of a small mountain community suddenly reappear, causing all kinds of tensions. In Katla, however, not every 'returning' character is the doppelgänger of a dead person — in some cases they replicate living people. Their presence is unsettling and destabilising in an already unsettled and destabilised community, and the show digs into questions of grief, memory, trauma and family. It's not a gentle show, but it's really well done.
The next show, Vagrant Queen, is far more brainless — a ridiculous cheesy space opera, airing on SyFy and I believe based on a comic. The 'vagrant queen' of the title is deposed and in exile after a violent revolution on her home planet, and she now wanders the galaxy in a rickety space ship with various misfits, eking out a living doing salvage operations, and fleeing from the show's scenery-chewing villain. Every twist is telegraphed from a mile off, and the whole thing is a catalogue of clichés, but if you like lurid neon space opera with a found family of drifters, it's a lot of fun.
The final show I watched was Ms Represented, a documentary about women in Australian politics. I wrote about it earlier in this post.
Wynonna Earp's final season finally found a home on a UK streaming service, which meant that we were able to watch it after waiting a year! I believe this season came as a bit of a shock to the showrunners, and they decided to reward their small — but vocal and devoted — fanbase with pure fanservice. The show was always deeply silly, but this time they dialled things up to eleven. I loved it.
Lucifer is another deeply silly show resurrected on a new platform after an apparant cancellation. This latest season dropped a lot of the case of the week stuff in favour of a longer arc involving a war to inherit the role of God, and lots of celestial family drama, and I'm not sure this was the best approach. Lucifer is one of the few shows where I want monster-of-the-week plots rather than serialised television, and although I still enjoyed the character interactions it wasn't my favourite season of the show.
Lupin's second half was a delight from start to finish. Omar Sy is brilliant in the role (although I have to laugh at the fact that all his heists succeed on the basis that he's someone no one notices — he has such presence that in real life he'd be impossible to miss!), I adore all the supporting characters, and I only wish that we were getting more of the show!
The third of the shows about trickster gods with names beginning with 'L' is Loki. I know a lot of people in my Dreamwidth circle liked this, and I don't like to devote lots of space disparaging things that friends enjoyed, so I shall simply say that I really, really disliked this. My favourite Marvel film is Ragnarok, with the first Thor film a very close second, so to say I was disappointed in the show is an understatement.
For something completely different, the Icelandic Netflix show Katla is a complete shift in tone. It's set in a small village near the eponymous volcano, which has been erupting constantly for over a year, covering the area with ash and rendering it virtually uninhabitable. The only remaining residents are those too stubborn to leave, too traumatised and haunted by events in their past to sever their connection with the area, or those stuck there in order to carry out scientific research. The plot reminds me somewhat of the French show Les Revenants, in which dead family members and neighbours of the inhabitants of a small mountain community suddenly reappear, causing all kinds of tensions. In Katla, however, not every 'returning' character is the doppelgänger of a dead person — in some cases they replicate living people. Their presence is unsettling and destabilising in an already unsettled and destabilised community, and the show digs into questions of grief, memory, trauma and family. It's not a gentle show, but it's really well done.
The next show, Vagrant Queen, is far more brainless — a ridiculous cheesy space opera, airing on SyFy and I believe based on a comic. The 'vagrant queen' of the title is deposed and in exile after a violent revolution on her home planet, and she now wanders the galaxy in a rickety space ship with various misfits, eking out a living doing salvage operations, and fleeing from the show's scenery-chewing villain. Every twist is telegraphed from a mile off, and the whole thing is a catalogue of clichés, but if you like lurid neon space opera with a found family of drifters, it's a lot of fun.
The final show I watched was Ms Represented, a documentary about women in Australian politics. I wrote about it earlier in this post.
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Date: 2021-08-14 08:50 am (UTC)Katla was great, but if you don't enjoy dark and creepy (and at times violent) stuff in visual form, I would definitely recommend against it.