Clobby Clobsters

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".

[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.

[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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

Sarah Lynn has always been a source more of humor than of drama on BoJack Horseman. Sure, there's always been a dark edge to the jokes made about her drug-induced lifestyle and the ways in which she was doomed from a young age, but for the most part, it was part and parcel with the satire of Hollywood and its dark side that stretches throughout this series. And yet, in this episode, that humor is brought down to Earth. It's not that there's no ridiculousness here, but suddenly the show starts taking that part of Sarah Lynn's background seriously.

And the tragedy of it becomes much more clear. Both BoJack and Sarah Lynn have been harmed by this lifestyle, bereft of empathy and only seeking thrills and substances to try to fill that hole in their lives. But the difference is that BoJack came to acting as an adult. Sarah Lynn was forced into it as a child, she never had a choice, and she never had a chance, and that's tragic. That's what makes something truly tragedy -- not just that it's sad, not just that it's unfair, but that it's the horrible result of forces beyond a person's control.

There's a Trainspotting vibe to this episode, a sense in which both BoJack and Sarah are letting go of whatever control they have as they take a feverish jaunt across L.A. and eventually across the country. That leads to the episode feeling somewhat shaggy in places, but it works with the rambling, unfocused, black out experience of the main characters, and so it works. That tack gives the story momentum even when it's rolling all over the place.

That spree takes BoJack (repeatedly) to the door of Ana Spanakopita, where she delivers an assessment of BoJack that is possibly even more harsh than Todd's. When BoJack asks why she abandoned him when he needed her the most, she basically tells him that he is not only unsaveable, but that he brings down anyone who would try to help him. He doesn't quite understand it, but there's a cold truth to those words, especially as they come to fruition in the rest of the episode, as BoJack brings down two young women.

The first of these is Penny. After a frantic, misguided attempt to make amends to all of the people BoJack's hurt (which leads it a hilarious "Dianne is just Asian Daria" routine), BoJack stalks Penny at Oberlin. In the process, he discovers something surprising -- she's just fine. She seems happy; she has friends, and she seems cool and comfortable where she is. That is, until BoJack shows up to mess that up. His presence reminds her of what happened and rattles her in what seemed like a safe environment. As Sarah Lynn points out, she was good until he showed up.

Sarah Lynn doesn't have the same kind of self-awareness about the way in which BoJack brought her down as well. It's hard to say that BoJack is truly the cause of Sarah Lynn's downfall. After all, in the past there were her parents and the other parts of the Hollywood machine that helped turn her into the person she became, and in the present, the very fact that Sarah Lynn was only engaging with sobriety so that she could get a really good high later suggests this would have happened eventually regardless of what BoJack did. (And, true to life, people who relapse often overdose, because their tolerance has diminished but they still consume their drug of choice in the quantities they used to, which overwhelms their systems.) To a degree, there was an inevitability to this.

But BoJack could have been there, could have eased her away from it, could have been a voice of experience and an angel on her shoulder rather than someone who brought her into his desperate race away from his own misery. Instead, BoJack was feeling bad for himself, and had managed to alienate literally everyone else important in his life. So he resorted to his old co-star, the one he was a father figure to, and jumpstarted the process that led to her demise. Maybe this would have happened eventually anyway, but BoJack was there, he hastened it, and took part in it, and managed to lose one of the last people who'd bother speaking to him in the process.

BoJack has his own damage to deal with, and much of it isn't his fault. He has an emptiness and a selfishness that he inherited, both through nature and nurture. The problem is that he prioritizes his own pain over everyone and everything else, and doesn't care about what his means of trying to feel better, or at least feel less, does to anyone close to him. That's what makes Ana's words so vital here -- BoJack really is drowning, he really is thrashing and kicking and trying to keep his head above water. He has legitimate problems, and sometimes he even makes legitimate attempts to fix them, but he's oblivious to those connections to others in this terrifying world, and that's his greatest sin.

So we feel for him when he loses out on that Oscar. It represents something important for him -- a signifier that his life and his work meant something. And we sympathize when he wants to do anything but face reality when that falls apart. But then Sarah Lynn wins an Oscar, and we see how meaningless it is for her. All she can do in that moment is think about what it should mean, what it would have meant to her, before she went down this path. BoJack is a victim, but also a perpetrator. As far as we see, Sarah is just a victim, someone who was poisoned before she even really knew how to read. And BoJack could have done something to stop it, to help it, then and now, but didn't.

Because BoJack just wants to try to anesthetize himself from his own pain, to hold himself back from his own damage. That's why when he looks into the projected stars of the planetarium, he absolves himself. BoJack never accepts blame, never takes the fault. He looks at the vastness of the universe and the eons that pass in a blink when pulled out to that scale, and declares that he need not feel bad for anything he does because nothing he does matters. To put it in Brothers Karamazov terms, anything is permitted. BoJack takes it to the self-serving extreme, to ignore his fractured attempts at making good so that he needn't feel guilt.

There is, however, a catch the nihilist's way out. Try as he might, BoJack still feels a connection to Sarah Lynn. As they sit on that bench together, gazing at the sunset as they've done in the past, he realizes that she is one of the few people equipped to understand him. They may have come to it on different terms, but they've been through the same thing. He cares about her. He may not want to care about anyone. It's easier to justify your own bad actions, to compartmentalize all the terrible things you've done, if you don't care about anyone.

But he does. And Sarah Lynn dies. And he was there for it all.

That's the kicker. Maybe your choices don't matter on a cosmic scale, but they matter on a personal one. You can hurt the people you care about, and no matter how many beers you drink, how many drugs you take, how many false amends you yell into the night, you will still feel that. BoJack will still feel that. All of his attempts to run away from his pain have only caused more pain, for many innocent people whom he's dragged beneath the waves with him, and for himself.

Who knows if Sarah Lynn would ever have become an architect. Maybe she would, as Tony Soprano once put it, ended up selling lawn furniture on Route 9. But maybe she would have been happy. Maybe BoJack could have helped her be happy, made himself happy, or at least avoided letting one more lost soul into his morass of discontent. Instead, a young woman dies, and for all his attempts to avoid his own hurt, to avoid the results of his bad acts, they finally catch up to him, and to those unfortunate enough to be in his wake when that reckoning comes.

Previous episode was the best one! That was breathtaking. I wish Bryce Dallas Howard would direct more episodes. Also could Taika Waititi comeback for like an episode, please?

No, of course I didn't seen this one yet. I'm kinda cheating and fishing for some answers here, mate.

Casual watcher are you reading this? Anyone else enjoys the show for only the show itself? I just kinda wanna know if anyone feels the same way.
I like there way the show looks, sounds and feels. It generates excitement, it's immersive as hell almost like playing Skyrim for the first time. But I do not give a shit about the main plot or lore plot important daggers be damn.

In order to enjoy it you need to turn your brain off and forgave so many plot conveniences. I don't care about most of the characters, including "baby Yoda". I'm not a fan of Star Wars, old or new.
As a franchise, for me personally, it has 2 and a half good films: A New Hope, New Hope 2 The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi... lay the pitchfork down! It had the potential - interesting scenes, characters conflicts and themes that overweighted slapstick level of humour in the scenes that begged to be written seriously.

Anyway; it almost feels like you have to be American and/or grow up watching Star Wars otherwise it's too "black and white", simple and why so much attention given to bloodlines anyway?!

TL;DR a crazy person looks up reviews for fan service heavy show with years of lore and is surprised by heavy focus on the lore in the comment section and reviews. Oh, well.

9.6/10. One of the strangest experiences of growing up is realizing that adults are just grown up kids, and there's not some magical totem you're given when you hit a certain age that gives you wisdom and maturity and the knowledge of what the hell you're doing. "Mixology" is, first and foremost, about that realization, and also about growing up. Despite the oddities that stem from the various romantic entanglements, Jeff and Britta spend much of the series playing Mom and Dad to the other characters. Here, Troy has the recognition that the people he looked up to are still his friends, but are flawed human beings like any other who may be just as naive and/or full of shit as he is.

Annie's struggling with the idea of growing up too. While her story starts with a fake ID as a catalyst for her concocting an increasingly byzantine backstory and performance as a young drifter from Corpus Christie, it ends with Annie realizing that she relishes the idea of this character so much because she has her whole path to adulthood plotted out, and there's something disheartening about the lack of uncertainty or spontaneity in that. It's some great comedy from Allison Brie, but also a nice moment of pathos for her character.

These two stories collide when Annie and Troy find themselves together at the end of the night, and realize that neither one of them is the same person that they were when they first met one another. Whether they want to think of themselves as adults or not, each has grown and changed and become a better person than they were in high school, and each being able to recognize that in the other is affirming for both of them.

There's a lot of other great stuff in the episode. There's some firm emotional truth in Shirley wanting to forget her drink-laden path and having the gang be kind of cruel in how it makes fun of her, another sign of their lack of maturity and that even the seemingly most put-together adults have rough patches. Pierce's storyline with his wheelchair helps reinforce this through the idea that even the oldest member of the group can have trouble admitting he's not in control and needs help. The Abed thing with Paul F. Thompkins feels like it's just there for comic relief, but it's good comic relief so it gets a pass. And Jeff and Britta arguing constantly, then making out whilst drunk, and then realizing they're talking about the same bar, are the perfect beats to accentuate both the comedy and the larger point about the pair's role in this episode.

Overall, this is one of Community's finest outings, which combines lots of great bits of humor with the profound darkness the show is known for, this time in the context of the realization that being an adult isn't what you imagine it to be and people you look up to can let you down, but also with a bit of optimism in those closing scenes where the show reconstructs that myth a bit, by showing that its two adolescents are growing and becoming better people regardless.

Well, I am not a Marvel Fan as such and I certainly don't read the comics. I watched about 90 % of the movies but they became more and more tedious for me. I just mention this so you better understand my comment.
I watch the Marvel shows because they are on Disney. Simple as that. Some I liked (Wanda and Falcon), some I didn't (Loki) and this one is kind of in nowhere-land. Started well and I hoped it would make the character of Hawkeye more interesting. It didn't, and after the first couple of episodes I liked it less and less. The story just didn't make me care for anything that happened on screen. And the humor and awkwardness that nowadays seems to be a must-have doesn't sit well with me either. What some percieve as funny are roll-eyes-moments for me I could live without. There were no real highlights and I really didn't like Kate Bishop. Bringing back Kingpin only made me realize how much I would love to have had another Daredevil season.
Since this shows main purpose is to be a precursor for upcoming movies I might not even watch, it is entirely possibly I am not getting the point of them. Maybe they don't work as stand alone because they are not supposed to. And because of that maybe I should not watch another.
I am not ripping them of or calling them awful but that's my point of view.

[7.7/10] I was so pleasantly surprised by this! I didn’t really know what to expect, with this being Marvel Studios’ first foray into animation and the high concept premise of the show. But I really enjoyed what we got.

For a while, I expected that this was really just going to be the plot of Captain America: The First Avenger except with Peggy slotted in rather than Steve. And that would still have been perfectly fun! Watching this show hit the same beats of that film, except with small but significant difference thanks to Captain Carter being in the role rather than Steve Rogers would have been worthwhile on its own.

For one thing, I like how this episode, as Agent Carter did, focuses on how even with her accomplsuhments, Peggy faces discrimination because of her gender. Of all the people for the MCU to bring back, it’s funny that it’s Bradley Whitford’s returning from the all-but forgotten Agent Carter one-shot. But he makes sense as someone who always thought too little of Peggy, stepping into a leadership role after Col. Phillips is shot, and creating an internal impediment.

To the same end, I like how the episode flips the dynamic with Peggy and Steve, but tshowing how they still understood one another and would bond with one another, even if their situations were changed. The two still falling in love, only to have Peggy making the heroic civilization-saving sacrifice play instead, is still heart-rending, and a nice sign that even as major things change, some things stay the same.

But I also liked the places where this episode goes off the reservation! Howard Stark building a proto-Iron Man suit for Steve Rogers called “The Hydra Stomper”? Yes please! Captain Carter saving Bucky, thereby avoiding the Winter Soldier situation (at least with him)? Hell yes. Her finding the tesseract and bringing it back to the good guys on an early mission? Awesome!

The further along the plot of First Avenger that this episode gets, the more it diverges and makes its own rules and own story, and I really appreciated that. Her team’s attack on Red Skull’s stronghold made for a rolokcing conclusion. I don’t know who Red Skull’s “champion” was. (Hive? A Chithuri?) But watching Peggy fight a giant squid monster while the Howling Commandos rescue Steve made for a killer conclusion.

I was especially impressed by the fight sequences here. I have to admit that I had some reticence about the cell-shaded graphics. In truth, the vocal tracks didn’t always sink perfectly. But the action was surprisingly fluid and well-staged. The show uses the freedom of animation to add greater flow to Captain Carter’s badassery, and some of the combat has a more impressionsitic style that makes it top tier MCU fisticuffs. Even the use of lighting and color in these fights stand out. Going into What If...? my biggest concern was the visuals, but they came through like gangbusters.

Overall, this was an exciting start to this new show and raised my expectations for What If...? to be more than a shiny lark, and instead be a meaningful exploration of what these changes in the path might look like.

[6.1/10] This is another one that just didn’t do much for me. The real good stuff here is all on the edges. Abed’s Batman routine is mainly comic relief, but damn if Danny Pudi doesn’t just commit and wring every ounce of humor out of it. And I especially like the Shirley C-story, where she realizes she’s projecting her own hurt over her estranged husband onto Britta and taking it out on Prof. Slater. Yvette Nicole Brown really gives a great dramatic performance there, full of hurt and realization. It’s subtle but strong acting that sells it

But man, am I not interested in a cliché pull between Jeff being a suave man on the prowl and Jeff being a good friend to the group. His exchanges with Slater have some good energy, but the whole shtick with Britta as his Jiminy Cricket is lame, and the whole conflict is too. At the same time, Pierce feeling insecure about his age could be interesting, but it’s played so cartoony and coupled with a drug trip that saps it of any force. (Though you can see Justin Lin trying out some fancy director moves here and there, so there’s that.)

Overall, this one is a non-starter and weak entry in the show’s early going.

[8.6/10] There’s often one line or stretch of an episode of BoJack that sums up the central idea of the episode. It’s usually a meaningful monologue of some kind, possibly one like the one in this episode, put over a montage of our protagonists in some state of contemplation or distress. Sometimes it’s a bit much, but oftentimes, it helps put a bow on everything we’ve seen.

Here, that’s Diane’s speech to Mr. Peanutbutter about what it’s like to be her. She talks about a constant feeling of your life being a puzzle, but one combining different sets, to where you feel like nothing fits. And then you realize, maybe it’s you that doesn't fit.

That’s a harrowing statement, one that everyone in the main cast has grappled with. Except that Diane posits there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, where you start finding a puzzle you belong in, and it’s worrying at first, but eventually it feels like home. That’s just as heartening as it is disconcerting to hear the “lost puzzle piece” analogy in the first place. And it’s true for most everyone.

Diane has found a lot of the success and happiness that she’s always been looking for. Her book is successful enough that she’s called for a signing. She’s comfortable enough with her relationship with Guy that she’s happy to move to Houston with nothing more than a word that Sonny is moving there with his mom. She’s happy with the person she’s become, fulfilled by the connection her work has for kids like Sonny and happy to be an “us” not a “me.”

Mr. Peanutbutter is still working on himself, but he’s finding out how to be a “me” not an “us” and it seems like a type of growth from him. He’s been a sillier, more comic relief character, but he too has had an arc of sorts. So it’s nice to see him find his own shade of self-assurance and progress, where he’s ready to really listen Diane (even if he finds writing frustratingly easy -- an amusing gag), and reassures her that if they’d met each other now, they wouldn’t be the people they were now, because their past relationship helped them get to this separate, happy place for both of them. It’s a beautiful sentiment that puts a nice button on things for them.

Todd gets a chance to grow too. His “puzzle where I don’t fit” situation is his family, where he was kicked out and felt like he didn’t belong, or at least that his mother didn’t want him. I’ll admit, the path to get to a repaired relationship with his mom is a little zany, but I like the two of them hashing that decision out, acknowledging that Todd has grown up (at least to some degree), but finding a place they can occupy in one another’s life.

Plus, classic Todd shenanigans! For all the dramatic stuff in this episode, I like that we also get to tie a bow on the business with Character Actress Margo Martindale! Todd concocting a zany scheme to allow his mom to “save” his life and pay back his kidney donation is a lot of fun. Martindale is a hoot as always, and her causing a panic attack due to being too damn good at acting is hilarious. The closing scene where she gets out of going to jail by needing to be in another indie film got a solid chuckle out of me.

The other person who feels strangely at home now is Princess Carolyn. I’ll admit, I don’t know if I really needed a romance between her and Judah, but I don’t mind it either. He’s always been there for her, supported her, and gone the extra mile for her, and that’s nice to see in a show where PC is always sacrificing her own happiness for other people. There’s something very Mad Men about where they go with that, but there’s worse blueprints to follow. (And Judah’s adorable literal, and very sweet song helps grease the wheels.)

I like where it takes PC professionally as well. The offer to run her own studio division is a great opportunity for someone who’s worked so hard to get where she is. And I like the notion that she’s gotten so lost in her work that she’s forgotten what her dreams were and isn’t quite sure what she wants. But the idea of building something that’s her own rather than taking a slice of something that somebody else built feels very true to her self-sufficient ethos, and if nothing else, I appreciate that Judah is a part of that, not an alternative to that.

But that leads us to BoJack, and one of the darkest, saddest chapters in his life, which is saying something. He gets a call from Angela, the executive who convinced him to turn his back on Kazz. He’s clearly relapsed, and already not in the best mindset. Angela offers him a faustian bargain -- they’ll edit him out of Horsin’ Around reruns so the studio can still make money off the show without the negative associations of his presence, but he’l have to sign away his back end for a one-time pay-off. Angela dresses it up as honoring Sarah Lynn and giving her legacy beyond being the girl that he killed, but it’s more craven B.S. just meant to keep the money train rolling.

BoJack guiltily signs the contract, but nearly burns it when she admits that she was bluffing when she told him that he had no choice but to throw Kazz under the bus back in the nineties. He blames every bad thing on that choice, on that lie, on a decision he feels manipulated into. But Angela gives him an “everything is bullshit” speech, and given where BoJack’s life is right now, he’s willing to believe it.

Because he is that puzzle piece that doesn't fit anymore. He’s not allowed to exist in the world as he once did. He’s literally being edited out of his own show. He returns to a house that he doesn't own and doesn't belong in anymore. And he sees the bright young aspiring actor who has the best brought out of him by his best friend, and when the clip ends, sees the haggard, drunk, horse who’s ruined it all staring back at him.

That’s a hard look. “Angela” sees so many of the characters having found peace, having made things better in their lives and grown by finding the place where they belong and the people they belong with. BoJack just gets message after message that he doesn't belong anywhere, that he’s hurt everyone he’s crossed paths with, that he’s the piece that doesn't fit, and it’s scary to contemplate where that might lead him.

[7.6/10] I both love and hate how this mid-season finale is the negative image of the prior episode. While “The Face of Depression” was about BoJack moving past his sins, and the ways in which he is unexpectedly capable of helping others, “A Quick One, While He’s Away” is about how those sins are still poised to come back to haunt him, and how other people are still dealing with the lingering effects of his worst behavior.

For the latter, we reunite with Kelsey Jennings, the original Secretariat director who, as she herself notes, was the only person in any way punished by the incident in season 2 where she and BoJack and the rest of the crew broke into the Nixon library to film the big scene. Much of this season, and frankly this series, is about how women bear the brunt of the negative consequences for this kind of behavior, and I like this as an illustration of that. (It’s no coincidence that all of our point of view characters in this episode, and the people who harm has been visited upon, are women).

We haven’t seen much of Jennings since season 2. But when we check in on her life, we see how she’s reduced to doing “sponsored immersive content” far below her talent while hacks like her film school pal get to do big budget work. Hers is one of the few hopeful stories here, where she sticks to her guns and to who she is when she pitches for a big time superhero movie, and ends up winning the job. But at the same time, the episode isn’t shy about how much of a struggle it’s been for her to get out of director jail all this time.

Things are, shall we say, less hopeful for Gina, who we see for the first time in season 6. She’s the lead in her own film, but she’s still traumatized by what happened on the set of Philbert last season. It’s reached the point where she’s hypersensitive about anything even vaguely surprising happening on set, and when, in a moment of improvisation, her costar holds her by the neck as part of an innocuous dance move, she has a moment of panic, falls and hits her head, and ends up storming off the set while packaging it as the “modicum of respect” she’s owed as number one on the callsheet.

It’s a sort of pain and discomfort that is not her fault, that is the result of BoJack’s issues being inflicted on someone else, but when Kelsey is looking for an actress to star in the new film, Gina’s current director gives her the dreaded temperamental label. It’s mediated by other events, but however much BoJack has gotten better, his actions have made Gina’s life and her profession less secure for her, and indirectly keeps from getting a bigger break (or even, possibly, a smaller one).

But these are events that are unlikely to be seen or understood by BoJack, if he’s ever aware of them at all. It’s also no coincidence that none of the regular characters appear in the episode (outside of the intro). In many ways, “A Quick One While He’s Away” is about the ripple effects of BoJack’s behavior, occurring far outside of his immediate orbit, but still affecting people far beyond him and maybe even coming back to haunt him.

The least compelling of these is the big His Girl Friday parody of the investigative reporter pursuing the story of who was with Sarah Lynn on the night she died. While I can appreciate the specificity, accuracy, and joie de vivre of the spoof, it feels like a mismatch for what the show is trying to do with the Sarah Lynn story. There’s something poetic and ironic about Sarah Lynn’s death being the thing that convinced BoJack to start trying to get better, but which could, if his role in it is exposed by a reporter, be the thing that ultimately tears him down. The breadcrumbs that the reporters find are interesting, particularly when it seems to lead them to Penny and her family as well, but it feels more like a weird tease of things to come within this broadly comic shell than anything substantive in his own right.

But the best of the four stories is Hollyhock’s, where what starts as a story of BoJack’s actions having second order effects on people in his life turns into a story of his old misdeeds coming back to haunt him. I like how the show explores Hollyhock’s reluctance to drink given the most recent examples in her life of people out of control, something she knows is in her blood and that makes it hard for her to relax and enjoy something fun. Her interactions with Tawnie, her panic attack, and her gentle recovery from it are all endearing and well-observed and a little sweet.

The catch is that the person who helps her out of that panic attack at a college party is Pete, one of Penny’s high school classmates. The two commiserate over their mutual traumatic experiences involving alcohol, and it’s a convincingly quick bond between them. That turns more traumatic, though, when Pete starts telling Hollyhock about how “this guy” was the cause of this horrible experience, with the episode making a devastating cut right before the person in the world BoJack loves most and sees as the best reflection of himself learns what is, well, not even the worst thing about him, but something that could still shatter Hollyhock’s image of her big brother in her mind.

I like the way the episode sets all of this up, teasing out connections between these events at the periphery until they crystalize into a broader, more haunting whole. The show finds a natural way for Hollyhock to learn about one of BoJack’s worst sins, through a chance connection that is just intermediated enough to not feel contrived.

That’s the bitter irony of this one. The BoJack we’ve known and watched for five and a half seasons has made meaningful progress in getting better. He has accepted himself, learned to forgive himself, made it possible for him to help others and think of their needs before his. He has taken these lessons and these mistakes and used them to become someone who is worthy of the care and attention and affection so many people have shown him before he did anything to deserve it. He is trying to make a fresh start and to forgive himself for the things that, in the episode where we got into his head, led to him constantly calling himself a stupid piece of shit.

And just when he has that breakthrough, just when he becomes a person semi-worthy of his status and web of meaningful relationships, the ghosts of his past seem poised to emerge all at once to tear his life asunder. BoJack may be getting better, may be turning a corner, but the other people touched by his worst actions are not, are still hurting from the things he’s done, some never to recover. Even as the show implicitly lauds BoJack for his progress, it doesn't forget the lasting harm he’s done to others not so privileged or lucky to be able to recover from it. That afterimage of his own recovery, the uncertain future so many people, so many young women, will labor under, isn’t going away, and that’s the thought BoJack Horseman leaves us with, as our heroes are left on the sidelines, before at the beginning of the end.

[7.6/10] I didn’t like the sitcom material in this one as much as in the prior two episodes, but I liked the dramatic/horror material even better, so it balances out. It’s hard to say why the 1970s sitcom stuff didn’t work for me as well. It didn’t quite have the zip or the verve of the 50s and 60s parodies. Wanda wandering around her home with Geraldine, trying not to reveal that she’s pregnant or the weird stuff resulting from the combination of her powers and her labor didn’t have as much comic zing as the boss dinner or magic act.

But what it did have was some (I think) clever commentary on television conventions, like how quickly kids grow up on TV shows and how sitcoms used to come up with zany ways to try to hide actresses’ pregnancies so that they wouldn’t have to incorporate the babies or pregnancies into the show. There’s at least some high concept fun to be had.

It’s also a nice episode for the effects team. They come with a lot of creative ways to show Wanda’s powers tricking out while she’s having labor pains. I particularly enjoyed the appearance of the stork, replete with red smokes that fails to shoo it off, and an Untitled Goose Game-esque effort at blending into its surroundings.

But more than anything, I like the deeper confrontation of horror and tragedy that’s been lurking at the edges of the show coming to the fore. Details like Vision telling Wanda something seems wrong only for her to clip things back again gets your attention. The neighbors cutting through partitions and whispering about what they’re really doing here without spilling the beans feels freaky. And things come to a head when Wanda and Vision’s twins are born (a cute resolution to the “Billy vs. Tommy” debate by the way).

It introduces a note of grief to the proceedings, as the babies’ arrival isn’t just a cause for joy for Wanda, but also a reminder of her dead brother, her lost twin. There’s a subtle sense of grief running through the show, and maybe the sense that Wanda is trying to escape from it here, wherever here is.

It also gives us the clearest look at Geraldine, who is, apparently, not like the other residents of Westview. She knows about Ultron and seems to be trying to get through to Wanda in some way. It’s a striking conversation between them, one of the scariest in the show, with Wanda seeming downright frightened when the sanctity of her world seems to be threatened. There’s a certain sense that maybe the other residents are prisoners here, held captive by Wanda’s abilities and emotional turmoil, and I’m fascinated to see where that goes.

We also get the sense that Shield or some other governmental force is monitoring the situation, and perhaps that Geraldine was sent in to try to distract or get through to Wanda.

Overall, I am loving the concept here and the hints at the margins of what might be wrong with this scenario. I certainly don’t want to wait another week for more!

This wasn't a very funny episode. Most of this was straight up, if occasionally lighthearted, drama. There is something unbelievably sad about seeing someone be both self-destructive and hurtful to the people they care about in the choices they make. From the second BoJack took Penny on a driving lesson, I was convinced they would hook up. It's kind of how television works and he already sort of pulled this trick with Sabrina from Horsin' Around.

But the show convinced me that's not where they were going, and then yes and no and yes and no that by the end of it, I was not only convinced that BoJack and Penny weren't going to hook up, but I was actually proud of BoJack for turning Penny down, not only when he was still fairly right-minded and knew she was feeling weak after the prom, but then again after he was feeling down and vulnerable after being told to leave by Charlotte.

But that just made the finish, where Charlotte finds them about to go at it, all the more horrible and disappointing. The last five minutes or so of the episode, where BoJack and Charlotte seem so close and he seems so happy, transitioning to Charlotte's inevitable realization that it's not good for him to be there, on to the terrible betrayal of finding him in bed with her daughter, was powerful and dark and--to use a word I keep coming back to when talking about this show--devastating.

It's devastating to watch someone burn their own life, their own chances for happiness down. BoJack was never going to get back together with Charlotte. She's right to point out that she doesn't know him anymore, and that BoJack's idealized something as a salvation. She's also right that he's trying to run away from deeper problems when his real issues are internal. But he could have had support. He could have had friendship. He could have had the real connections with other people, albeit platonic ones, that help make a person feel loved and whole. Instead, he not only couldn't sustain that, but he had to sabotage any chance of that with Charlotte and her family, hurt a friend who's shown him nothing but kindness, and try to exorcise the demons of his past with a young woman whom, he admits in his more clear-headed moments, doesn't know what she wants.

It's not comedy. It doesn't have to be. To be frank, a lot of the comedy doesn't really work in this episode. The jokes about Trip's boner are pretty lame. Kyle is basically a non-entity. The sitcom-esque intro to Charlotte's life was just kind of there; the high school drama element is fairly cliche, and really only Maddie's delivery of the word "society" gave me a chuckle. But the character work, and the dramatic elements in the episode's close really carried the day. It's not the last minute gut-punch of my favorite Futurama episodes; it's a core of sadness that runs through BoJack and eventually dissolves into wherever he is and whatever he touches.

It's sad. It's really sad. And the episode's final moment that juxtaposes him with an equally sad Dianne isn't promising for BoJack not making any further bad decisions. But it's still damn good.

The early arcs might drag slightly, but oh, the four part finale redeems it all.It has everything essential about these characters. Anakin's desperate longing for human connection and for those he holds most dear to be alright, and the rejection and disillusionment he feels from the weight of this war. Obi-Wan swallowing down his doubts and hopes to be the perfect model Jedi, pushing away and distancing himself from his closest friends in the process. Yoda hopeless and raw, wishing for the old days when Ahsoka was a Jedi and the Jedi weren't soldiers, and unable to shake the dread in his soul.

And, of course, the core trio of this season- Ahsoka, Rex, and Maul- shine. Maul's the last physical antagonist of the show but even in this moment he's overshadowed by Sidious. There's this dread to him as he can sense that everything is about to change, that he is always one step behind his master. He's always playing catch up, always surviving instead of thriving. That is his tragedy- a pawn that's outlived his usefulness trying to become a king. A man who thinks vengeance and power will finally give him satisfaction, but the pursuit of these things have only left him alone and hollow. Like Vader himself, it's that tragedy that makes him so compelling to watch, and Witwer perfectly acts every inch of Maul's bitterness and despair and dissatisfaction. Maul hates who he is, what he knows, and he will never be satisfied. He will never be happy. But he has no choice to be what he is, from the very beginning. He never had a chance.

None of them do. Maul is desperate, even willing to team up with his sworn enemy Kenobi to kill Skywalker. This is his last fight against the inevitability of fate, and it is already doomed. Neither of them arrived- they were called to 'rescue' Palpatine from Grevious. Ahsoka came instead. Sidious is about to seize power. Anakin's already killed Dooku, falling further and further. It's too late for Maul to stop his master and too late for Ahsoka to save hers. And yet they fight anyway. Because Ahsoka believes in Anakin so much, she cannot turn against him. She knows this is not the clones' fault, so she cannot kill them. She's left the Jedi Order and has found her own morals, her own way. Rex, meanwhile has come to realize he moves his brothers above all else, but must fight against them. Each of them have their own pathos that makes this enthralling entertainment.

The fight scenes are gorgeous- Ahsoka and Maul's battle being a standout. The beautiful environments, from the shattered throne room to the icy moon the series ends on, will take your breath away. But more than anything else, the ending justifies it all. Each Star Wars movie, even the darkest, end with at least a hint of triumph, or a light flung into the future. Attack of the Clones almost ends on the formation of the clones, a moment Yoda dreads, but the marriage of Anakin and Padame is a reminder that Luke and Lelia are on the way. Empire Strikes Back and Last Jedi both end with the heroes fractured but not broken, ready for round three. And even Revenge of the Sith assures us Luke and Leia will make things right in the end. Animated contemporaries Rebels and Resistance, too, end in triumph.

Not Clone Wars.

Clone Wars is a tragedy. There is no flash forward to better days, there is no hint of the rebellion, or that Ahsoka and Rex will be fine in the end. The last shot of Ahsoka shows her haunted, and the last shot of the show...is Vader, reflected in the helmet of one of the clones he respected so much, and was respected by in turn.A helmet specially decorated in support of Ahsoka, who both Anakin and the 501st adored, a last reminder of Anakin's and the clones' humanity, completely discarded. The ending doesn't care about the Skywalker Saga, about Anakin being redeemed in the end, or Luke rising up, or Rey carrying on their legacy. And that's what makes it great.

The clones were made for this war- pawns from life to death. All to help facilitate Anakin’s fall. For Anakin and his prophecy the clones and so many people from the Jedi to the average man suffered and died in a brutal, grueling war that only led to a brutal and grueling regime. All actors of a play they were never privy to. The show has the conviction to not cushion that blow.It is about the Clone Wars, not what comes after, and the Clone wars was a tragedy without redemption. Nothing will have made this war matter retroactively. The vast majority of people have no idea that a rebellion is forming or that Luke and Leia were born. All the Jedi and clones and civilians we've grown attached to and seen die certainly don't. The Clone Wars pulls back and shows exactly what the Skywalker Saga, what the Chosen One prophecy, has wrought on the people that saga turned its back on- the nobodies. The ordinary. After one horrendous finale, this one- this show- shows what Star Wars could be, and quite possibly never will be again. And I will always love it for that.

We're all going to die.

This fact breaks people. Humans will worry about death for their entire lives. And why shouldn't they? It's the end, after which comes the unknown. No one knows what happens when you die, but leaving this earth scares us. So we believe something actually happens when you die - you go to heaven, a paradise similar to earth, or you become reborn.

What probably happens when you die is similar to our personal experiences of the year 1856. Nothing. Everything ends.

But for Bojack Horseman, and for many others, he doesn't want his life to end, especially not at this point in it. So, he imagines closure. His brain has a lucid dream where he meets all his dead friends, and they tell him they forgive him. They all leave him, and prepare him for his turn. It's a pretty good way to go out, given the event itself.

But this closure isn't real. Bojack is drowning in a pool, and there is an overwhelmingly large chance that he is going to die. The View From Halfway Down, as expected from Bojack-level writing, expertly hints at the real outcome of this episode. He can't remember what's happening, a black-as-death liquid keeps dripping on his head, his food and water taste like chlorine, he is with those who have already died, a bird dying before leaving a house is an omen of death, and so on and so forth. Even more clever details are dropped as special little Easter eggs: the paintings are all from different places, and behind more warped as time passed; Bojack takes Sarah Lynn to the house, much like he took her to her death; and, for an extra kicker, it is revealed he is drowning 17 minutes in - exactly how long he waited while Sarah Lynn was dying before calling an ambulance.

At the same time, the content itself is brilliant - a final, grandiose goodbye to those who died, and phenomenal conversations on death, legacy and true selflessness between wonderfully charismatic and engaging personalities (all made up in Bojack's head), as well as the haunting portrayal of Bojack's impending and terrifying doom. Herb is awesome, Sarah Lynn is tragic, Zach Braff is hilarious, and Secretariat/Butterscotch Horseman is endlessly interesting. And that poem, man, that is absolutely impeccable.

Bojack still lives, though. Watching through to the end credits shows this - his heart is still beating. Whether that's what he deserved or not is obviously left up to discussion, but I still like how we're given reasons that he should live - he is remorseful, he holds himself accountable for mistakes, and as the final phone call makes clear, he just wants to know that his loved ones are ok. I'm absolutely fine with Bojack living on, and giving my one of my favourite final episodes of all time.

Bojack Horseman will still die. But he has time to make his life good again. And maybe, just maybe, it'll finally work.

[8.1/10] A very nice way to end the season. Let’s take thing story by store.

I loved the Diane-Mr. Peanutbutter story, because (a.) it felt so real and (b.) it really captured the best and the worst of them as a couple. Everything from little arguments in traffic, to nice gestures that don’t quite connect, to big gestures that lead to misunderstandings and emotional realizations. It feels like BoJack had been setting up Diane and Mr. PB to fail as a couple from the beginning, but credit where it’s due, they’ve soft-pedaled their falling apart nicely, to where it feels like the accumulation of a lot of little things, rather than some big blow up. Very well done, and lots of truth to how things seem headed for a split.

I also enjoyed the resolution to Todd’s crazy storyline with the rabid dentist clowns. Turning it into a way to motivate people to run is the sort of zany business idea he would come up with, and turning the fish from the Better Business Bureau into an asexual love interest for him is a nice place to end his arc for the season.

Princess Carolyn has a nice capper to her arc too. Her opening, Draper-esque monologue about how stories were great, but it’s important not to mistake storytelling for real life hits home. And I love the fact that after all her cajoling and manipulating, BoJack is good enough to do the Philbert show just because she tells him that she really needs him for it. It’s a subtle but effective sign of growth for him.

Last, but certainly not least, I love the resolution of the BoJack/Hollyhock saga. The lengths that he was willing to go to in order to help Hollyhock, with no desire for credit or expectation of reward, is such a sincere sign of change and an effort to do right by someone else. They did a great deal in S4 to show BoJack’s change through actions and showing, not just words and telling, and I really appreciate it.

At the same time, it’s great to use the Schindler’s List “done all I could” as a throughline. Seeing how far BoJack is willing to go, and using the same animation style for his “Piece of Shit” internal dialogue to illustrate it is a wonderful way to convey his learning to do and be something more selfless and empathetic than it was before.

His bonding with Hollyhock about the crappiness of honeydew, and the fact that his gesture breaks through is a really sweet moment. And the “but I’ve never had a brother” line, followed by BoJack’s little smile and the music playing over the end is just a perfect, heartwarming bit.

Overall, a nice capper to a stupendous season, full of creative risks, emotional moments, and inventive storytelling. For whatever reason, this show never fully worms it’s way into my heart when it’s not on the air (so to speak) but I always find myself appreciating it and admiring it when I watch it. I might need to go back and revisit earlier episodes more often, because there’s a lot there.

[8.5/10] Best of the season so far. I really enjoyed the A-story, of BoJack and Hollyhock visiting BoJack’s mom in her nursing home. There’s some real complex emotional stuff going on here, without the show laying it on too thick like it does on occasion. The fact that BoJack has such tremendous resentment for his mom, while Hollyhock just sees a sad old lady riddled with dementia, creates interesting inflection points between the two.

Plus, the fact that Mrs. Horseman can’t recognize her own son in the flesh (mistaking him for her maid, Henrietta) but sees him and even laughs at his antics on Horsin’ Around creates a really interesting conflict for BoJack, with hints that beneath her acerbic passive aggression, maybe she cares about him or at least notices him in some small way. On top of that, her distress at BoJack trying to do an episode as a stage play was gripping and uncomfortable in just the right way. Plus, I love the Hot Rod-esque reversal that BoJack wishes his mom was still mentally with it, not so that he could tell her loves her, but so he could tell her off.

The B-story is great too. There’s tremendous social satire in Diane’s story, which finds the intersection of feminism and the gun control debate. The notion of a traditionally left-wing issue like women feeling unsafe around and a traditionally right-wing issue like gun rights being blended together to halfway solve both problems creates some amusing and incisive social commentary. The twist that California only outlaws guns when a woman is responsible for a mass shooting is an amusing resolution.

To the same end, the recurring bit about the movie industry people getting constant google alerts about mass shootings and responding with the same monotone “thoughts and prayers” language is a very dark but also hilarious strain of humor. It’s always nice to have J.K. Simmons back in the fold, and their schtick about repurposing a gun violence movie as a female empowerment movie is another nice bit of satire, this time aimed at Hollywoo.

Overall, this is the first episode of the season where every facet of the show has been firing on all cylinders. Nice to see!

:white_check_mark:86% = Great! = Essential!

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time! This time, the return of the Doctor, plastic boyfriends, and conspiracy theories!

STORY:

There’s no better way to pull in viewers old and new than that classic title sequence with Murray Gold’s beautiful rendition of the theme tune!

Russell T. Davies effectively kicks off 21st-century Doctor Who by introducing the new companion, the old monsters, and the mysterious Doctor during the first few minutes. The first half of the episode expertly places the series in a modern setting, feeling realistic despite the science fiction theme.

The script makes the Doctor a great, mysterious character. It feels like it draws inspiration from the unrealized Cartmel Master Plan.

Rose is firmly told from the companion's point of view, establishing her role as an important audience surrogate. Those opening moments tell us all we need to know about her, her everyday life, and the world she lives in. And mere moments after that, RTD effectively introduces creepy killer mannequins (the Autons, not seen since the 70s!) and the mysterious, leather-clad stranger telling Rose to run for her life (the Doctor, not seen since 1996/1999/2003!).

Moving at a brisk pace, there's still a good time to develop Rose, her relationships with Mickey and her mother, and the mystery surrounding the Doctor’s identity. RTD throws in hints at a major war in the Doctor’s past while firmly developing the rather simple alien invasion plot (the least interesting aspect of the story). The characters are relatable; the humor is silly but actually fun; and the action and tension are palpably believable.

Overall, this is a sharply written episode, effectively introducing new audiences to the premise of the show while comfortably bringing back old fans. While elements of classic Doctor Who are present, the show firmly incorporates them into a contemporary, 21st-century framework.

POPULATION:

Christopher Eccleston is very different from the textbook Doctor from the Classic Era—energetic, dropping pop culture references, and looking somewhat normal in that leather jacket and with that buzz cut—but he also shows familiar quirky alien qualities that make him recognisable to old fans. The most interesting part is how he hides his anger, sorrow, and depression under layers of false cheer.

Billie Piper feels like a mid-2000s 20-something. She's easy to identify with. She's just the right amount of curious and suspicious to feel realistic. They have amazing chemistry from their very first moments, particularly in the scene where the Doctor tells Rose about himself while they're walking towards the TARDIS.

She lives with her strict mother (the commanding Camille Coduri) and her goofy but helpful boyfriend (the he-who-fandom-is-trying-to-forget Noel Clarke), who regrettably serves only as comic relief and doesn't receive the respect he deserves as a character.

PRODUCTION:

The music is wonderful, the direction feels slick and modern, and the Autons are well-realized.

Looking back at the visuals today, Rose (and the entire Series 1) are showing their age. The weird white glow effect is very distracting, and some of the bigger visual effects look strange (the wheelie bin bit and the Nestene Consciousness). Then again, the practical effects of the Autons are very effective. And there is a certain charm to wonky special effects, as fans of the Classic Show surely agree.

ATMOSPHERE:

Many Doctor Who episodes in the revived era follow this template, which is fast-paced and exciting, but with enough time to develop the characters and the story.

That opening scene with the Autons slowly creeping towards Rose is an incredibly powerful sequence, and one that surely helped fans accept that this was indeed Doctor Who returning. The rest of the story is filled with wonder and excitement, feeling both fresh and old-school at the same time.

The climax with the Nestene is a great moment for the Doctor, as he gets to have a proper speech to save the day. The final few moments are wonderfully tense. The anti-plastic thing is a bit of a simplistic solution, but it doesn't hamper the story too much.

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS:

I've always disliked the strange white glow in the episodes of Series 1. It's so distracting, but it doesn't look as bad in HD.

The Ninth Doctor has recently regenerated and had several adventures on his own before this episode.

It is lovely how this episode feels modern by actually having Rose search the internet to try to find out who the Doctor is.

Not even New Who is always great! The scene with Mickey being drawn into the garbage bin, followed by the bin burping, is cringeworthy.

I love the TARDIS interior reveal. They draw it out so perfectly, and the moment is so rewarding.

The Doctor: "Lots of planets have a north!"

The disappointment in the Doctor's eyes when Rose initially turns down his offer to join him is so palpable, it's heartbreaking.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

With Rose, Russell T. Davies did the impossible and brought back a beloved BBC franchise for audiences new and old, effectively updating the series while respecting its roots.

"Is it...terrifying?"

"No. I don't think so. It's the way it is, you know? Everything must come to an end, the drip finally stops."

"...See you on the other side."

"Oh Bojack, no. There is no other side. This is it."

I don't really know what to say about this show. I'm gonna try, anyway.

This is one of the most hilarious and most depressing things ever. You want to call it a comedy, because of the witty and funny dialogue, but you can't, because each episode has one idea, one subtle but major lesson for the viewers. Maybe it's a brilliantly constructed campaign for feminism, maybe it is a brilliant look at dementia, or suicide, or drinking. There is always a constant though - it is brilliant.

One of the biggest standouts for this show is its characters. Just the five main characters are some of the best I've ever seen - Todd, Princess Carolyn, Mr Peanutbutter, Diane and of course, Bojack Horseman. All five are broken in some way (some much more in others), and it's so engaging to watch how these people deal with highs, lows, and how they change/don't change. Bojack Horseman himself is hands down the most interesting character I've ever seen in television - you can't agree with his actions, and you want to hate him for his worst moments, but you can't help but root for him and his ability to change. And he does - and doesn't.

While the first six episodes aren't that great, the rest of the series (and I mean the rest) is absolutely the best stuff out there. In my opinion, the seventh episode is where things really start, and if you watch the eighth episode, The Telescope, and you still don't like this series, then this probably isn't your thing.

If you are willing to watch through some of the most depressing, yet astounding, episodes ever, this is the show for you. I think that really everyone needs to see this, if they are willing.

(Also just a quick seasonal ranking - 4>6>5=3>2>>1)

My Top Ten Avatar Episodes: #2

Look, this isn't a perfect finale. I do feel like Energybending is a bit of an easy way out for Aang, and a bit out of nowhere. In defence of this, however, it is evident that Aang could easily kill Ozai throughout the entire final fight. The purpose of the Energybending was to show that Aang is a pacifist, and does not believe in killing anyone. He wants to take his own path through life, and this is shown since the very start.
Other than that, everything else is amazing. The Final Agni Kai between Zuko and Azula is an incredibly satisfying payoff for his journey, and the music changes the context of the scene from an epic battle to a tragic circumstance, where a brother and sister are duelling, likely to the death. The faceoff between Aang and Ozai is incredibly epic and even has character relevance in it. In fact, basically every single scene in every battle is visually stunning and very cinematic. Even Sokka and Toph's side story, taking down the Fire Nation Fleet, is awesome, with each character showing the extent of their powers in taking down the airships.
My favourite scene in this finale is probably Azula's final scene, having a full-on mental breakdown at the prospect of her loss. It's not satisfying to see her like this, the primary antagonist defeated, it's saddening, to see a manipulated 14-year-old crying. And that's brilliant.
I don't have much else to say about this finale, it's just really amazing. Not perfect, but amazing.
9.7/10

My Top Ten Avatar Episodes: #3

This is just a really nice filler episode. We get to see each of the characters just going about their lives: Aang helps someone make a nice zoo, Katara and Toph go to a spa, Iroh goes about helping people (because of course he would), Sokka gets in a haiku rap battle (because of course he would), Zuko goes on a date, and Momo has a wacky misadventure with some big cats. It's just nice to have a break from all the big events happening, and settle down with these characters a bit.
But Avatar goes further and inserts deeper meaning into these episodes. Katara and Toph's spa day helps them develop a better friendship, and so does their encounter with some bullies, who they drown like the trash they are. This encounter reveals some of Toph's worries about her looks, and Katara comforts her. Momo's adventure also conveys his feelings towards the disappearance of Appa, and how he misses him. Zuko's date shows his softer side, and he expresses happiness for possibly the first time in the series. And Iroh...I don't think I need to talk about Iroh's tale. You all probably know already. It's really sad, I cried, I don't often do that, moving on.
Overall, a phenomenal filler episode, although not really one, considering the amount of character development present.
9.7/10

My Top Ten Avatar Episodes: #5

This episode (and the previous part) kind of feels like a finale in itself. We have almost all of the characters we've seen in the series coming together for one big invasion. We see Sokka showing his growth from the start of the season, and leading a full-on attack on the Fire Nation. The plan of attack has so many things going for it and is very interesting to watch play out.
However, the plan fails. Azula knew what was coming, and made some incredibly clever preparations for the Day of Black Sun. Even when she is caught by the others, she is still able to outmaneuver both Aang and Toph, and doesn't give up any information. The Invasion is a total failure, and that's what makes this episode so awesome. It ups the stakes for the finale, and gives a brutal sting to the audience knowing that many characters have been captured, including the reveal of Suki. Not only that, but the introduction of the Fire Nation Air Fleet is haunting, and a bit terrifying.
On the plus side, we get to see one extremely positive note near the end of the episode - Zuko finishes his character arc, one of the best redemption arcs all time, in an amazing confrontation with his father, luke skywalker Fire Lord Ozai. This scene is brilliantly written, with Zuko telling his father straight up that what he did, everything he has done to him is wrong, and redirecting his father's lightning right back at him. And seeing him following Team Avatar in a hot air balloon, while in previous episodes would be a cliffhanger for a possible fight, is instead a fist-pumping moment for the audience.
This is the 'Empire Strikes Back ending' of season 3, and a brilliant way to further set up the finale.
9.5/10

My Top Ten Avatar Episodes: #7

This is a really nice finale. We get to see all of the main characters cross paths, and the result of many of these characters actually interacting with each other, such as Zuko and Katara's heart to heart. All of the major characters make a choice, and these choices are big - Katara decides to hear Zuko out, Azula manipulates Zuko, who then betrays his uncle for a chance to reunite his family, Aang gives up Katara to continue his journey as the Avatar, and Iroh defends the gAang. All of these choices lead to consequences - Zuko's betrayal causes his uncle, the person who believes in him and helps him the most, to be arrested and captured, Azula's plan/lightning almost kills Aang, even in his Avatar State (which gives quite a scare to the viewers), Katara loses her superpowered water to save Aang, and biggest of all, the Earth Kingdom falls. Plus, we get to see one of the greatest fight scenes in the series, Aang and Katara vs Zuko and Azula.
Overall, this is a great finale to an amazing season and sets up the next one very nicely, as well as continues Zuko's character arc quite well.
9.4/10

My Top Ten Avatar Episodes: #9

This is a great episode for Katara, a character who often doesn't get much character development. It outlines Zuko and Katara's relationship, and a major reason why she doesn't trust him - her association of him, and in extension the fire nation, with the death of her mother. As a solution, Zuko gives her an opportunity to gain revenge against the man who killed her mother, and Katara takes it willingly, going so far as to bloodbend a fire nation soldier without hesitation and almost kill the murderer himself, in an astonishing scene where we see the extent of Katara's powers stopping rain in its tracks.
But, she doesn't kill the man. She doesn't forgive him, but she understands that killing the man, or in extension, anyone, is wrong, as Aang said near the beginning of the episode. And her closure from finding the pitiful excuse for a human helps her, finally, move past the death of her mother, and forgive Zuko.
My only real problem with this episode is that the dialogue is a bit heavy-handed every so often, but this isn't that big of a problem for me. Overall, this an astounding episode for Katara, and a bold one for a kid's show to create.
9.2/10

I was recommended by a colleague to watch this show. To put it bluntly I was sceptical - it seemed just like a kids cartoon, and I am in my mid 30s - but I decided to give it a go, mainly because he kept saying "trust me"!

Over the past month I have watched the entire series and must say I was quite impressed. While it definitely is aimed at a younger audience, like all good children's stories it appeals to parents and children alike. If anything, it appeals to adults because it reminds them of what they loved about children's stories as kids.

The first season took a few episodes to get going. It took me a while to get into it and embrace the characters. The early episodes tend to be generally self-contained stories, however towards the end of season 1 the story takes off, and the story become much more serialised. From then on out it is a really enjoyable ride all the way through to the series 3 finale. If anything it gets better from season to season.

The animation is first rate for TV. I have never really watched any anime (or anime-style, in this case) series before so I was definitely going into this green, but I found the quality to be first rate. The characters were also very well written, and the constructed world of element benders was believable within its mythos. I highly recommend this to kids and adults alike. Better still, watch it with your kids.

At the end of the day, they are just telling good stories, and who wouldn't enjoy that?

Wow. My reactions to this one are a bit all over the place, but...

First of all, nice job adapting the anime's opening-credits sequence. That was fun. And now that music's back stuck in my head.

For the most part, this one's story is that of the original anime's "Asteroid Blues" episode, with some minor adjustments, and that much works pretty well, although introducing Faye this early is a bit odd but... we'll see what they do with that.

I'm not sure I like giving Jet a family, making his immediate motivations about buying his daughter a decent birthday present. That sorta works, but the anime's making him the starving loner ex-cop whose motivation is mostly about putting food on the increasingly empty table seemed more effective. Otherwise, I'm liking Mustafa Shakir's take on Jet a lot—as well as John Cho's on Spike. Haven't seen enough of Daniella Pineda's Faye yet to have much opinion, but her attitude seems to work so far. (I don't really care that this Faye's not playing so hard to original-Faye's overt sensual angle, as long as this Faye is otherwise similar and interesting.)

As for the end... Hmm. Vicious is, of course, well, vicious, but that seemed rather unnecessarily unstable of him. And was that Julia? If so, that's a rather large change...

Waitaminute. No preview-of-next-session with those randomly wacky character narrations? Perhaps they were a bit too goofy to adapt well. Sigh. They were a fun dessert to each anime ep.

Overall, an interesting start with its own adjustments and wrinkles which we'll have to watch to see how they play out.