Once again the most interesting part of this whole fucking show is the stuff that gets the least amount of time. I could not care less about the sitcom shtick and I wish they would stop ripping off other shows when it serves little purpose except to make this all ridiculous when it could've been so much better.
In the movie Far From Heaven, you get this practically picturesque town and home life of a housewife in Connecticut. It's gorgeous and full of colors and 50s/60s "retro", what have you. It looks so perfect and lovely yet hides all sorts of ugliness underneath the perfect veneer of "All American Dream". Imagine that kind of set up but with horror and mindfuckery and that could've been THIS FUCKING SHOW.
Each episode continues to disappoint.
Each episode shows me how this would have been better served in a binge-watch (if they ever fucking do anything with the reveal).
Each episode annoys me with a pointless, obnoxious laugh track.
And each episode has me not giving a single damn about this couple or buying into any of their "chemistry" or love. This relationship was developed completely offscreen, and now I'm just supposed to believe they are some shining example of True Love because Marvel clearly wants Young Avengers? Nope. Not happening. I demand better writing and pacing, thank you.
Olsen and Bettany are very talented and capable actors in other projects but here, I can't buy anything between them.
The pacing is just painful and not at all suspenseful. There's tension and then there's annoying the shit out of your audience. This show is the latter.
This show continues to be the epitome of "my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined".
Terribly boring. Doubt I’ll continue past episode 2. Just uninteresting and not funny.
update: watched the entire series.
still uninteresting, still not funny, the only thing worse than this in the MCU is Captain Marvel
I think I see the need for last episode now, but I still assert this show would be much more interesting if it could be entirely sitcom.
My issue is that I don’t entirely see this series as more than an experiment. As we see more and more, Wandavision is little more than doses of things we’ve seen elsewhere: Truman Show, Annihilation, Pleasantville, Inception. It makes for something decently interesting, but it brings up a branding problem that it feels as though it’s fighting really hard to course-correct. Marvel has built a brand mercilessly for nearly thirteen years now and although we were given the heads up that Phase 4 was going to get a little more out there, I’m not sure how this is correlating yet. When I think Marvel, I’m not sure something like Wandavision is what I’m expecting/wanting and yet when I think of weird, surrealist cinema Wandavision doesn’t really reach the depths of brilliance there either because it has to retain elements of the MCU when it could be David Lynch directs Marvel if they’d run with it.
Characters that didn't have any logic. Annoying rebellious acts for no apparent reasons. "Wise" elder characters who bicker and are useless. Story line was inexcusably weak, character development was pathetic, and it was altogether a bad show. Original Airbender was good, this was not. Teen drama crap.
I've never saw a episode so humanized. You can feel the pain from the villain and the heroes. And the long take (car scene) was the best of MCU until now - I didn't remember any long take, just saying.
[7.3/10] I’m not the kind of guy who tends to subscribe to wild fan theories or behind-the-scenes conspiracies. For the most part, I think artists give us what we need in the text, and that most “here’s what was really happening” explanations tends to be some combination of a stretch and wishful thinking. With that caveat in mind, let me throw out two baseless theories that, in my heart of hearts, I don’t really believe and have no strong evidence for, but find interesting nonetheless.
Theory #1 is that in actuality, BoJack really died at the end of the last episode, and “Nice While It Lasted” is just another dying dream where he has the chance to make peace with his closest friends. “The View from Halfway Down” was very impressionistic to let the audience know that this was all a delusion or at least something fanciful that BoJack experienced while he sat in the pool, but maybe the series finale is actually just another form of BoJack’s brain “giving him what he needs” to be at peace. Maybe the prior episode is him grappling with his feelings about the people he’s lost, and the current one is about him grappling with the people who’ll survive him. Maybe he just wants to reassure himself that they’ll all be okay.
Theory #2 is that Raphael Bob-Waksberg and the rest of the creative time at BoJack Horseman wanted to kill BoJack off at the end of “The View from Halfway Down”, but Netflix said no, either because they thought it was too dark or too alienating or just wanted to leave the door open to revive the show in some form someday. So maybe this is a compromise, where Bob-Waksberg and company got to do their thing in the penultimate episode, and then fulfilled the necessity for a studio-mandated dose of take-backsies in the finale where BoJack survives, but “dies” in the sense that he’s not going to be in these people’s lives anymore.
There’s a lot of problems with these theories. As my wife pointed out, a big issue with Theory #1 is the fact that if BoJack’s brain was trying to let him make peace with everyone in his life, it would have included him reconciling with Hollyhock, whose absence is still noteworthy here. What’s more, I have no actual evidence for Theory #2, and it’s just a wild guess based on the sort of abrupt transition between the prior episode in this one. If anything a few creators have boasted about the lack of interference from studio execs.
But I spin these theories not because I truly believe them, but because I want to believe them. Let me be frank. BoJack Horseman chickened out here. It would be a bold move, one not seen with such force since The Sopranos, to show your main character coming so close to getting better, only to sink back into old habits and (at least implicitly) die.
And yet it wouldn’t be as dark as David Chase’s landmark series was, because one of BoJack’s last good acts was to help improve the lives of those closest to him. There’s poignance in the idea that BoJack couldn’t fix himself, but could at least help repair the harm he’d done to so many people who had supported him, and help set them all on brighter paths.
“Nice While It Lasted” feels like a fingers-crossed version of that same idea. It still has some weight to see BoJack effectively excised from the lives of Todd, Princess Carloyn, and Diane (or at least minimized). There’s melancholy beauty in the notion that BoJack’s dearest friends have become new people, people who have changed for the better thanks in part to knowing him, but that those changes mean he doesn't really have a place in their lives anymore.
But it’s weakened by the way that the series finale kind of undoes the consequences that the whole season (or at least half-season) built up to in the span of a two-minute opening montage. BoJack’s past misdeeds didn’t come back to destroy him. His hubris in wanting to do another interview didn’t send him on a downward spiral that leads to being a pariah, relapsing, and eventually recklessly causing an end to his life in his depressed self-loathing.
Instead, he’s physically fine, seemingly having suffered no ill-effects from his face down excursion to the pool. Sure, he has to go to jail for fourteen months, but that’s just given him a chance to get sober. And what’s more, he even has a career to look forward to afterward if he wants it, since “Horny Unicorn” is tracking to be a hit. On BoJack Horseman’s account, Hollywood and people in general have short memories, meaning he can pick up where he left things more or less if he wants to.
That development has a certain cynical charm to it, in the idea that even someone who gets jeered at on the street can, with enough time, just make his comeback once something else has become the cause celebre. And yet, transporting a lack of consequences in real life to a lack of consequences in your story, without making it the focus, makes this ending feel emptier than it should.
Despite that, there’s a good deal to admire about “Nice While It Lasted.” While the show shys away from killing off its title character, it does suggest there’s at least some cost to BoJack’s choices over the past season and longer, in that it’s prompted his enablers and those hurt by him to take a step back from his life. Rather than going for some big, grand guignol final frame, the show laudably goes for something low-key, just a series of conversations among friends. And those exchanges are pleasant, put buttons on some of the show’s running gags, and are all-around well-written.
Mr. Peanutbutter is still his cheerful, friendly self, but one who’s grown from his usual co-dependency and is recognizing some of his own patterns for the better. He seems like the one person who’s still likely to be in BoJack’s life on a regular basis (he jokingly sentences BoJack to a life filled with his friendship), and there’s an irony to the fact that he’s probably the person in BoJack’s circle whom he liked the least.
His mini-escape with Todd is a pleasant one, mixing amusing gags about the existentialist lyricism of the “Hokey Pokey” with the notion that the future is unknown and with that comes possibilities that are unexpected but encouraging. After all his shenanigans and struggles, Todd ended up meeting someone he could settle down with and reconnecting, in some tentative way at least, with his estranged mom. It’s a nice place to leave him.
It’s a nice place to leave Princess Carolyn too. Her and BoJack’s conversation about his imagined “go to him” scene at her wedding is the best in the episode, one that nicely invokes the “difference between real life and television” theme that has been with the show for a long time. It’s heartening to see PC still carrying her bits of apprehension, but also having achieved the life she wants, with a child, a supportive partner, and success on her own terms. Most importantly, she no longer feels bound to clean up BoJack’s messes or prop him up.
There’s a similar tack to the showpiece of the episode, which comes in BoJack’s closing conversation with Diane. It nicely addresses the emotional burden he put on her with his near-death phone call, the way it nearly toppled her life into disarray once more, and nicely reveals her subsequent righting of the ship, move, and marriage. It explicates the way their friendship changed each for the better, while not erasing the people each were before, but also putting their lives in different places now, literally and figuratively. It’s a little too cute and writerly in places, but their conversation works, and does a nice job of vindicating what it is arguably the core relationship of the series.
With that, the finale takes to put a bow on BoJack’s relationship with each of the series’s main characters, in commendably unadorned ways. If this is the direction the show decided (or hey, maybe was forced) to go with where we leave Bojack, the approach isn’t bad. It’s a good, not great ending.
There is something warm and wistful about all of the show’s supporting characters being in a happier, more stable, more fulfilled place than we left them, while leading lives that BoJack will mainly see from the outside in. There’s a Moses-esque bittersweetness to the way he sees his closest friends entering a promised land of joy and satisfaction that he himself cannot enter. It’s just a flinch from the stronger message, the bolder stroke, that the series seemed willing to make in the lead-up to this one.
But BoJack Horseman still ends its run as an adventurous, hilarious, and often harrowing series that constantly took chances and went places that a silly animal show, and plenty of serious dramas, wouldn’t take or go. Its final season touched on so many things that needed to be addressed, tying off the loose ends of so many characters and developments and ideas. It leaves the airwaves gently, with a lot of talk and a sweet but sad goodbye, and an indie song to set the mood.
I can’t help but wish it had gone one step further, but it’s hard to look askance after the boundaries this show pushed over the course of six seasons. As the title portends, the series was nice while it lasted. In the final tally, it gave a real life audience reason to see BoJack and the lives he touched in the complicated but comprehending way he seemed to crave so desperately within the show, and to remember him. Don’t act like you don’t know.
FUCK YOU JOHN WALKER STEVE ROGER'S LEGACY IS NOT EVEN REMOTELY GETTING BLOOD ON HIS SHIELD BECAUSE YOU KILLED A MAN WITH IT, YOU PIECE OF SHIT.
GodDAMN this show is just not pulling its punches.
[9.8/10] It seems like every season, there’s one episode of BoJack Horseman that just floors me, and this may be the best of them all. More than BoJack’s dream sequence in S1, more than his unforgivable act at the end of S2, more than the even the harrowing end for Sarah Lynn in S3, “Time’s Arrow” is a creative, tightly-written, absolutely devastating episode of television that is the crown jewel of Season 4 and possibly the series.
The inventiveness of the structure alone sets the episode apart. It feels of a piece with the likes of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for finding outside the box ways to communicate the idea of dementia and the brain purging and combining and reconstructing dreams and memories into one barely-comprehensible stew. The way that the episode jumps back and forth through time is a superb way to convey the way this story is jumbled up and hard to keep a foothold on for Beatrice.
And that doesn’t even take into account the other amazing visual ways the show communicates the difficulty and incoherence or what Beatrice is experiencing. The way random people lack features or have scratched out faces, the way her mother is depicted only in silhouette with the outline of that scar, the way the images stop and start or blur together at emotional moments all serve to enhance and deepen the experience.
What’s even more impressive is how “Time’s Arrow” tells a story that begins in Beatrice’s youth and ends in the present day, without ever feeling rushed or full of shortcuts. Every event matters, each is a piece of the whole, from a childhood run-in with scarlet fever to her coming out party to an argument about the maid, that convincingly accounts for how the joyful, smart young girl we meet in the Sugarman home turns into the bitter husk of a woman BoJack is putting in a home. It’s an origin story for Beatrice, and a convincing one, but also one of the parental trauma that has filtered its way down from BoJack’s grandparents all the way down to poor Hollyhock.
And my god, the psychological depth of this one! I rag on the show a decent amount for writing its pop psychology on the screen, but holy cow, the layers and layers of dysfunction and reaction and cause and effect here are just staggering. The impact of Beatrice’s father’s cajoling and her mother’s lobotomy on her development as a woman in a society that tried to force her into a role she didn’t want or necessarily fit is striking in where its tendrils reach throughout her development. The idea of rebelling against that, and the way BoJack’s dad fits into that part of her life is incredible. And the story of growing resentment over the years from a couple who once loved each other, or at least imagined they did and then found the reality different than the fantasy is striking and sad.
But that all pales in comparison in how it all of these events come together to explain Beatrice’s fraught, to say the least, relationship to motherhood and children. The climax of the episode, which intersperses scenes of the purging that happens when Beatrice contracts scarlet fever as a child, her giving birth to BoJack, and her helping her husband’s mistress give birth all add up to this complex, harrowing view of what being a mom, what having a child, amounts to in Beatrice’s eyes.
The baby doll that burns in the fire in her childhood room is an end of innocence, a gripping image that ties into Beatrice’s mother’s grief over Crackerjack’s demise and whether and how it’s acceptable to react to such a trauma. The birth of BoJack, for Beatrice, stands as the event that ruined her life. BoJack is forced to absorb the resentments that stem from Beatrice’s pregnancy being the thing that effectively (and societally) forced her to marry BoJack’s father, sending her into a loveless marriage and a life she doesn’t want all because of one night of rebellion she now bitterly regrets. For her, BoJack is an emblem of the life she never got to lead, and he unfairly suffers her abuses because of it, just like Beatrice suffered her own parents’ abuses.
Then there’s the jaw-dropping revelation that Hollyhock is not BoJack’s daughter, but rather, his sister. As telegraphed as Princess Carolyn’s life falling apart felt, this one caught me completely off-guard and it’s a startling, but powerful revelation that fits everything we know so well and yet completely changes the game. It provides the third prong of this pitchfork, the one where Beatrice is forced to help Henrietta, the woman who slept with her husband, avoid the mistake that she herself made, and in the process, tear a baby away from a mother who desperately wants to hold it. It is the culmination of so many inherited and passed down traumas and abuses, the kindness and cruelty unleashed on so many the same way it was unleashed on her, painted in a harrowing phantasmagoria of events through Beatrice’s life.
And yet, in the end, even though BoJack doesn’t know or understand these things, he cannot simply condemn his mother to suffer even if he’s understandably incapable of making peace with her. Such a horrifying series of images and events ends with an act of kindness. BoJack doesn’t understand the cycle of abuse that his mom is as much a part of as he is, but he has enough decency, enough kindness in him to leave Beatrice wrapped in a happy memory.
Like she asked his father to do, like she asked her six-year-old son to do, BoJack tells her a story. It’s a story of a warm, familiar place, of a loving family, of the simple pleasures of home and youth that began to evaporate the moment her brother didn’t return from the war. It’s BoJack’s strongest, possibly final, gift to his mother, to save her from the hellscape of her own mind and return her to that place of peace and tranquility.
More than ever, we understand the forces that conspired to make BoJack the damaged person he is today. It’s just the latest psychological casualty in a war that’s been unwittingly waged by different people across decades. But for such a difficult episode to watch and confront, it ends on a note of hope, that even with all that’s happened, BoJack has the spark of that young, happy girl who sat in her room and read stories, and gives his mother a small piece of kindness to carry with her. There stands BoJack, an individual often failing but at least trying to be better, and out there is Hollyhock, a sweet young woman, who represent the idea that maybe, just as this cycle was built up bit-by-bit, so too may it be dismantled, until that underlying sweetness is all that’s left.
For the love if shit, people. Without the first 3 episodes we wouldn't have this episode. Without the first 3 episodes this one wouldn't be as impactful. It's storytelling and all part of a larger whole. Stop saying, "finally we're getting somewhere," or "this is what the show should have been from the start." Its a journey. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. Holy shit.
This episode was lots of dirt flying everywhere, the sound of shots being fired and people yelling.
It's all very confusing, and the fact that it feels like there's 50 different characters doesn't help.The ony face/name connection I can make is Winters'. Of all the other's I have no idea who is who.
I do like how it's all very desaturated. It gives the show this bleak, old-timey feeling.
Recently, I read this interview with Kevin Feige where he said that the Academy Awards have a bias against Marvel movies.
If you ever wonder why that is, look no further than the first 20 minutes of this episode.
You get this long 10 minute scene between Pugh and Steinfeld which hits a lot of important emotional beats for the plot, and the writing is actually not too bad.
Sure you have Pugh doing that awful Russian accent again, and Hailee Steinfeld’s making weird faces as if she’s Kate McKinnon in an SNL skit, but that’s besides the point.
Look specifically at how they shoot it.
Besides the bland looking apartment, you cannot shoot such an important and lengthy scene doing nothing besides shots and reverse shots and then expect to get an Oscar (or in this case Emmy) for it.
It is literally the laziest and most uninspired way to approach a scene like that.
So, what do they do to mask the poor filmmaking and weak story choices (because let’s face it, Marvel has once again put out something with a messy and unfocussed plot)?
Just take a quick look at some of the other comments, and you’ll get the idea.
It’s like they’re dangling a ball in front of a cat, and it’s kinda embarrassing to see how effective that is.
As my wife aptly said after the conclusion of the episode, "there's plenty of action but not a lot of story here." There are certainly a lot of great moments and a good bit of mystery, but it feels more like a trailer for whats coming then a its own story.
If you missed the after credits go back and watch them !
spoiler if you have not see 4x12
i think they fuck up killing Poussey, it was a dead with no sense but to kill someone. I'm very dissapointed and i dont think i'll see the show again. The season was good i liked it there were couple of good episodes but 4x12 fuck everything, i have never cried that much but i don't see the point.
This show is hauntingly beautiful. I love how creative it is. It learns all the right lessons from Adventure Time without being derivative of it in any way.
I hope they make more.
The beast is a metaphor for time and age, right?
bro, where are they going to take this in season 3. im so intrigued, i have no idea!
I f*king cried, Luke at the end & R2 ?! best episode ever. This even tops the sequel triolgy for me. You know, this even makes 2020 a good year. 10/10
[8.1/10] Ahhh, it’s so great to be back in Avatar Land! Katara is still around! And she’s in the White Lotus Society! And she and Aang had three kids! And her son is the new Avatar’s airbending teacher! And he’s voiced by J.K. Simmons! And he has three kids of his own who seem to have Aang’s occasionally pestersome exuberance! And Toph has a daughter who’s tough as nails! And there’s whole squads of metal-benders now! And the four kingdoms have been unified into one united republic! To paraphrase Bart Simpson, “Overload! Excitement overload!”
But that’s just the stuff that ties into Avatar: The Last Airbender. What I really appreciate about The Legend of Korra’s first episode, is that it gives enough details and connections to its predecessor series to excite AtLA fans like me, but it’s still seems different and new and exciting and doing its own thing.
For one thing, Korra is not Aang. She is headstrong in a way that Aang isn’t really. Aang could be reckless and eager, but was rarely as bold and impulsive as Korra seems in the show’s opening installment. (I loved her “I’m the Avatar. Deal with it!” introduction.) Living in a more integrated society, she’s already mastered three of the four elements (earth, fire, and water). She’s very much of this time, not a relic of a century ago, but also very new to the ecosystem of Republic City.
That’s the great thing about the series premiere -- it’s familiar while still being novel. Korra’s quest isn’t as clear as Aang’s was in the early going. There’s no evil Firelord, no hunded years war, no step-by-step set of elements to master in time. There’s just one more element to learn, a complex city and society, and a young avatar who admits that she doesn’t really have a plan.
That’s wonderful! There’s such a sense of possibility to the series right out of the gate. I love the promise that Republic City holds. The world of Avatar has jumped several decades in the future, to where the vibe of the new metropolis is something approaching 1920s or 1930s New York. There are radios and cars and omnipresent dirigibles in the sky that mark this as something different than the feudal-type era depicted in AtLA.
There’s also just enough hints of bigger troubles in the city to whet one’s appetite for more. For one thing, I really like the notion that there’s a group out there that opposes all benders and views the use of their powers as a form of oppression. It’s a natural move for a franchise that’s always used its supernatural premise as a metaphor for societal issues. LoK introduces Republic City as a sort of utopia at first, with tall buildings and a buzz of activity, but quickly hints that not all’s well in the capital of the new republic forged by Aang and the rest of Team Avatar.
That comes through (and dovetails nicely with the anti-bender activists) when Korra breaks up a protection racket by a “Triad” gang of three guys who use their powers to harass a shopkeep. Korra, being the naturally protective and good avatar-in-training that she is, comes to their rescue, and the fact that these mobs exist, and that the cops arrest first and (under the auspices of Toph’s daughter) ask questions later, and that Tenzin says as much suggests that there are problems in Republic City despite its shiny exterior.
But what an exterior! It’s nice to see the world of Avatar depicted in beautiful HD. The elemental effects are just gorgeous, and there’s a fluidity to the way that Korra and others unleash their powers that even AtLA couldn’t always match. The animation seems to have stepped up a notch. At the same time, the design work is stellar. The bustling city at the center of the episode is remarkable and full of life, and everything from the statue of Aang in a nearby harbor to the glow of the underground quarters of the water tribe mark a distinctive, beautiful look for the whole place.
Of course, this being set in Avatar land, our hero has to answer the call to adventure. While the show belabors the passing of the torch idea with Katara a bit (who’s voiced by Eva Marie Saint of North by Northwest fame, it’s still feels true to the spirit of the franchise to have our hero set out despite being told not to. Katara’s polar bear dog (or is it some other hybrid) is a nicely cute animal sidekick in the proud tradition of Appa. And her misadventures in Republic City as a fish out of water make for a nice introduction to the new world.
There’s so much to unpack here, but really, that’s what makes “Welcome to Republic City” so exciting. There is just enough gestures toward the prior series to warm the hearts of those who watched Aang and company defeat Ozai. But it doesn’t feel like a rehash either, with the time jump and the change in circumstance inviting the devoted viewer to piece together what’s happened in the intervening seventy years and marvel at what’s to come.
I don’t know what I expected from the premiere of Legend of Korra exactly. Sequel series are tricky things. You have to feel of a piece with what came before without feeling derivative. “Welcome to Republic City” masters that balance beautifully. Korra feels fully formed and distinctive right out of the gate. The world of the New Republic seems ripe of exploration and new details just as the Four Kingdoms once did. And there is a new type of challenge, a new threat, new friends and foes to explore and discover.
We’ll see where Korra goes from here, whom she fights and whom she takes on as allies and where her journey to becoming the avatar and helping to realize Aang’s dream takes her. But for now, it’s more than enough to dive back into Avatar land, gawk at the new sights and developments that have unspooled in the last seven decades, and wait with enthusiasm for what’s yet to come.
I really want to like this show, but when you create an actual interesting character for once, and then sideline him by the end of the episode, you’re not doing yourself any favours.
They totally ignored what happened in the Aftermath novels, and changed almost everything. If they were going to include a character from the books they could at least have respected the plot. I was extremely excited when I found out that Cobb Vanth was going to appear early in the episode, but ended up growing more and more disappointed as it went on.
I don't know what to think.
Everything else about the episode was impressive, of course.
What the fuck is this garbage? I'm almost halfway through the second season and half the show so far has been centered around romantic dramas and politics/courtroom dramas—what am I watching? Fucking Suits? Banal, drawn out storylines, deus ex machinas; this show is not even half as good as Avatar.
I was spoiled about almost every part of this show when I started it. I was also not a child when I watched it, and understood what makes a show good or bad.
The fact that I was still floored by how amazing this show is says a lot.
[9.5/10] Despite the initial greatness of the dog revolution episode, only the second episode of the series, I might argue that this is where Rick and Morty became Rick and Morty. It’s all here – an escalating yet insane science fiction problem, Rick being self-centered and holding himself blameless, a great deal of weird but hilarious comedy, a dimension-hopping-related solution, a fun Jerry-focused subplot, and a gut punch, mind-wrinkling ending.
Two things stand out in particular rewatching this episode. First, the way in which Rick is constantly screwing things up and yet accepts none of the blame for it. He places this all on Morty, and pins every bad development on him, despite his grandson’s protestations. He is endlessly confident, even braggadocios, about how he’s brilliant and can fix it and brushes off any concern or censure for when his attempts go awry. And when things get really bad, his solution is to just ditch the universe and find another one.
It’s not a coincidence that this all takes place in an episode where Beth disregards her dad because “he left [her] mother.” Having seen two full episodes of Rick’s antics, I’m not sure there’s a better encapsulation of who he is than this episode, or at least the problems and self-enabling that can make him a pretty miserable person to have to deal with. When things start to get bad, he puts that on anyone but him, and even gets mean about it (calling Morty a creep, which, isn’t entirely unfair), and when things get really bad, he just finds an escape hatch and tries to wipe it all away. Everything is weightless to Rick, everything is just an inconvenience that he need not worry about, and if you make him worry long enough, he’ll just bail.
The second is Morty. Obviously the ending landed pretty hard the first time, but it’s even more impactful knowing what happens next, about Morty’s troubles coping with what he’s seen, of coming to terms with the wealth of alternate universes and other versions of himself out there, of his growing resentments for his grandfather and the way Rick treats him. Morty isn’t always great, but you feel for him trying to get through to Rick and make him accept some blame for how poorly things are going, only to be rebuffed and told that his grandfather is perfect and any bump in the road is Morty’s falt.
And still, that ending. “The Bridge” is a great choice for a melancholy, existence-questioning bit of wordless reflection. What I love about this episode is that it doesn’t really resolve anything. Normally, that’d be a drawback, but here it feels real. Rick doesn’t change or learn a lesson, he just offers a reset and doesn’t think twice about it. Morty doesn’t take it in stride, but walks around in shock that the people he knew and loved are gone in some other slice of reality and he is back living among their identical, indistinguishable doubles. Rick and Morty is often better with design than animation or character expression, but the wide-eyed look on Morty’s face so perfectly conveys the shock and discomfort of what just happened to him. It’s one of the show’s all time best sequence and a sign that this was going to be something deeper than just a series of funny, madcap, sci-fi adventures.
Those adventures are still great, and the escalating cronenberg problems were fun. (Jerry turning into a Mad Max style badass led to some great stuff as well). But this is the episode that revealed how philosophical, moral, and twisted the show was willing to get.
I've really enjoyed the first 2 episodes, while others seems to more uncertain. But this is the first episode I've been worried overall about the series. The modern underworld story just isn't interesting enough - I was kinda hoping we would see more Boba Fett the Bounty Hunter, not this form of a makeshift leader.
The humans grafting droid parts onto themselves, is a new concept in the Star Wars visual world, to my knowledge but it was executed so poorly. It's the first time I've looked at anything in the Disney SW era, and thought, "that doesn't look like Star Wars".
I'm not sure where this series is really going but EP4 needs to pick up the modern underworld story in a big way.
"Spectacular" "Amazing" Really? It was alright. It felt like a webisode (remember those?) than a pilot.
I don't like that they are turning a mercenary villain into a good guy just to make the series more digestible.
I also don't see it as a positive when a series is like another series. Take Better Call Saul, for example. It's very much its own thing.
I can't believe Filoni changed Kanan's story for the initial scene, ruining one of the best comics of the saga. The rest of the episode was very good, but these kind of things ruin the saga for fans and collectors. I guess we can't believe the Story Group has a real purpose anymore.
So sups were created by Nazi Germany now and the Endgame of the Company with a black CEO is white Supremacy?
I hope they clear the role of Stormfront and the guy running the Company who I don't remember the name of soon, because right now it looks like writers and recruitment didn't talk to each other.
There were better, more logical reasons for them to continue testing so they can give Compund V to adults (like predictability - adults have usually already shown their personality, while children are still forming theirs - giving compund V to a child you can end up with a Homelander or a Starlight while you probably want sth inbetween...)
Stormfront is all about female empowerment but also a sadistic racist? Damn. This show really isn't afraid of anything and I love it xD Can't wait for the moment she gets killed by Kimiko.
[8.6/10] So there was a post on Reddit the other day, asking when movies stopped showing people getting into elevators. OK, it’s more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of it. Movies used to show their characters walking to the door, walking down the hallway, getting into the car, stopping for gas, rolling on, arriving at their house, opening the door, and boom, that’s how you got to the next scene. Then, Godard happened, and suddenly you just cut past that stuff. The character was just in one room and then in the next and with a brief establishing shot or transition or even nothing more than the switch of backdrop, we eventually trust the audience to understand that the character did all that boring stuff in the meantime.
It’s the grammar and literacy of film audiences, and it’s just baked into our brains at this point. You don’t need to be told that Michel Poiccard didn’t apparate from one part of Marseille to another. We understand it intuitively in a way that audiences in the 1960s didn’t because we were raised on it. Maybe not to the degree that BoJack Horseman was raised on film and television, but still we know.
There are expectations on how this whole T.V. show thing works. Even in the post-Sopranos, peak T.V. era where everyone wants to do something a little differently, there’s basic rules for what television is, and how its deployed. You may not have A-plots and B-plots. You may not have three cameras or rising and falling action. But there are rules, damnit, and you’d better abide by most of them or risk alienating your audience (or taking refuge in being confusing which means your show is daring and smart).
And one of those rules, not in so many words, is don’t just have your character stand around and talk to the audience for half an hour. Save it for your one man show. Leave it on the stage. But for television, you need dynamism, you need things happening, you need multiple characters and incident and developments or people will get bored. You can’t leave your main character naked out there, especially in an animated show, when you’re not even limited to sets or locations or visual variety in the way that live action does.
But BoJack Horseman does. It gives you 21 uninterrupted minutes of its title character giving his mother’s eulogy, recounting his family history, doing a gallows humor-filled stand up routine, and processing the death of a woman he hated but still wanted approval from in one giant stream of consciousness presentation.
There’s interludes of humor in the form of those black comedy bits and the occasional musical accompaniment gag. There’s a cold open that flashes back to a glimpse of BoJack’s emotionally screwed up and emotionally screwing up father, and of BoJack’s first taste of how he thinks he’s supposed to process his mother’s absence. But for the most part, it’s just BoJack, in a room, practically talking directly to the audience, for a whole episode.
It is bananas. You could perform it as a monologue for your high school. You could print the whole thing out and turn it into one of those giant movie posters where the words make up the imagery of the film in some kind of literary pointillism. You could listen to it in the car and not miss much beyond the occasional coffin-side glance or impressionistic moment. It’s not something that had to be on television, that could only work in this medium.
And somehow, that’s what makes it feel as bold as it does, because it chooses to set aside all those tools in the T.V. toolbox that help make us feel things: the sad music, the hauntingly lit scene, the expressive reactions of other characters. It eschews using those same sweetners that help keep up the audience’s interest during a half-hour sitcom: scene changes, change-of-pace sideplots, pure comic relief. And instead it just gives you a sad, messed up horse on stage, digesting his relationship with his parents in real time for what is an eternity on television, and hopes it can keep your attention, make you feel BoJack’s pain, and thread the complex emotional and familial needles the series has been toying with for four and half season, with words alone.
Television is, as BoJack and BoJack wink at, considered more of a writer’s medium than a visual medium like film. That’s changing, but it comes from the fact that television started out as something much cheaper, much faster, and much more disposable than its cinematic brethren. There wasn’t money or time to worry about fancy images or incredible sets or stunning cinematography. You needed to film twenty something episode in about as many weeks and do it on the budget provided, which meant the spark had to come from the talents of performers like Lucille Ball and the skills of writers who could make three cameras and two rooms feel like an entire world.
That’s the advantage of the T.G.I.F. shows that Horsin’ Around is spoofing. Yeah, it’s easy to make fun at the laugh track or the outrageous situations, or the cornball humor. But those shows emerged from a long and proud tradition, of folks who may have been doing what they had to for a paycheck, but who also made some magic with the meager tools at their disposal, who taught a generation of latchkey kids and people whose lives were far removed from the ease and security of a T.V. family what good could look and feel like it.
It’s a feeling that BoJack has been chasing for his entire life, and it’s led him here, to twenty-minute half-rant/half-confession delivered to his mother’s coffin. And in those twenty minutes, he chews on his confused feelings about his parents, the way that he doesn't so much mourn his mother but mourns the end of a possibility for love from her than he didn’t really believe in in the first place, the way that he tacitly admits his father taught him not to rely on her or anyone, the way he acknowledges the screwed up solace in admitting that you’re drowning together as a family, the way he cherishes those brief respites when you can stop and see your family being as graceful and happy as anyone else’s, the way we confuse and expect big gestures in lieu of the everyday work of being good, the way we look for hidden depths and transcendent meaning in coffee mugs and I.C.U. signs and sad horse shows that may or may not be able to sustain them.
He does it all from a podium, a lecturn, a stage, that lets all that raw emotion and complicated feeling spill out and just sit there with the audience. There’s no subplot to cut to, no wacky interlude from Todd to take the edge off, no break from a man making peace with the fact that he’ll never make peace over this. It’s just there, in one big dose, for BoJack and the audience to have to swallow at the same time, in a way that T.V. almost never makes you do.
T.V. is usually gentler, easier, more escapist than that, even at its most challenging and un-user friendly. If you watch the 1960s Star Trek series you can see the wild new locales the show journeys to every week, the occasionally repetitive but differently-flavored guest stars who would arrive on a daily basis to fight our heroes or help them or just create a problem for them to be solved. And if you watched long enough, you would recognize that every other episode seems to have Captain Kirk schmoozing, smooching, and seducing his way out of (or into) whatever the problem of the week is.
It’s easy to write of Kirk as a womanizer until you realize that T.V. was different in the 1960s. However more colorful and adventure-filled Star Trek was relative to the twenty-minute speech of “Free Churro”, it was also meant to be disposable, watched once and never seen again, before Netflix binges or home video or even syndication were reasonably expectations for people to string all these disparate stories together in one cohesive whole.
You realize, then, that Kirk wasn’t meant to be a lothario in a series of continuing adventures. He was meant to be a passionate man in a bunch of disconnected stories that happened to feature the same characters. He didn’t leap from bed to bed -- he was just fated by the laws of television to find The One over and over again, because like BoJack says, and the arrival of the Starship Enterprise in last year’s Star Trek Discovery vindicates, the show just goes on.
That’s what we do when people die. We try to make sense of their life, and our relationships with them. We try to take all those individual moments that they lived, all those big events, and the moments that we shared with them, and sew them together into some sort of narrative that makes sense to us.
But lives aren’t stories. They don’t always have happy endings, or arcs, or resolution. Sometimes they just end. Sometimes you only see part of who your parents were and are and try construct the rest into something you can extract meaning from. Sometimes you only feel the ways your absent friends shaped you, or scarred you, and try to understand how and why it happened now that they’re no longer around to be asked. Sometimes you take that rush of moments and try to build it up into something you can wrap your head around, a series of episodes with lovable characters and continuity and choices that are as comprehensible as they are kind.
And sometimes, someone important in your life is gone and everything’s worse now. There are rules for television, unwritten stricture for how we communicate with one another in the medium, expectations that the audience can walk in with that may be subverted but have to be respected.
But life and death have no rules other than that each of us must experience both, however brief or painful or confusing that may be. And there are no rules for grief, the process by which we try to come to terms with a parent’s death, the marks their presence and absence have left on our lives. So BoJack Horseman breaks the rules of television, stops telling us stories, and just gives us twenty minutes of raw, writerly confession and digestion, as interconnected and familiar and yet unknowable as the real life tangles of being alive and watching someone die, without the comforts the glowing screen normally provides its hero, or its audience.
Not a bad show by any means but if I'm honest I liked WandaVision more. I feel like I am missing a lot of background.
