Average episode rating: 5.923
That feels about right. I could be talked into Math.floor()ing that, too. Oops, I just did.
The season got off to a pretty underwhelming and off-putting start, then got pretty good for a couple episodes before dropping back into the trap of overly sexualizing every situation possible.
Hollywood writers—especially any who work for Syfy—say it with me: Not everything is about sex.
Again.
Say it again.
Repeat until you actually understand the words.
I call out Syfy writers specifically because one need only look at the other shows on their slate recently to find examples of characters being put in bed with each other for no particular reason other than "sex sells". It happens in Killjoys a lot, too—another Syfy Original. Based on just the two, I'm not inclined to give any other Syfy original shows a chance. (I haven't watched enough of Wynonna Earp to know if it also falls into this trap, but the likelihood that I will ever watch another episode of that show has just dropped even further.)
Between characters screwing each other at every possible opportunity and the sheer amount of gratuitous blood & gore, I'm downright resentful that I still want to know what happens next. This show wasn't fun to watch, and it's not even using the sex and violence to make a worthwhile point. The real surprise for me, at this point, is that I managed to get through the whole season in just under 9 months.
Average episode rating this season: 6.71428571(…, presumably)
The Orville's sophomore season got away from a lot of the sophomoric humor that put me off its freshman outing. This time around it felt much more like a "real" sci-fi show, tackling present-day issues with allegorical stories set in a (mostly) utopian future. Remind you of any other well-known sci-fi franchise? (We know the homage is no accident. Just look at who from *ahem* that other franchise ended up on the production team here.)
I wrapped up my season one review with something of an ultimatum: "If the show doesn't evolve in season two, I likely won't continue following it." (https://trakt.tv/comments/153991), and I'm glad to say that it did evolve. We got more believable dramatic stakes, fewer bad jokes, and an overall higher writing quality that—while still not "Totally Ninja"—was at least adequate. A few Star Trek actors brought in as guest stars (plus Ted Danson as a Union admiral) sweetened the pot a bit, too.
Is this the best show ever written? Well, no. It's not going to win your heart with amazing writing—maybe not even with the characters. But it most definitely is trying to be more than the lame comedy it was at first.
Average episode rating for this season: 6.6
I appreciate the more serious tone this show has taken since the beginning, but did often wish for the stories to be less predictable and, perhaps, a bit less overtly preachy. Writing a story about the thing in human society (even if the story is "about" an alien race) is easier than devising a clever metaphor that merely alludes to some human failing, though, and having the characters say exactly what you (the writers) mean is also much more likely to "land" with the viewers who you want to hear the message.
Unfortunately doing it this way also tends to make The Orville seem even more like "21st-century humans in the future", a problem it's had since day one due to the use of present-day slang and other conventions. The best sci-fi draws you into its own world, and often addresses social (or other) issues through creative reframing, rather than just straight-up pointing at aliens who do something we'd like to see less of in our own society and saying "aren't these people assholes?"
Somehow, despite all of this, the show still scratches my "classic Star Trek" itch like nothing else. I still hope it gets another season or two, ideally with even more focus on fleshing out the show's universe. Some big stuff happened in this season that would be a shame to just leave hanging.
Average episode rating this season: 7.13636363… (7.14285714… if 1x01 and 1x02 are not rated separately)
Coming from the vast universe of Star Trek, I found this to be a surprisingly strong first season. While all Trek shows of the '80s and '90s had a well deserved reputation for weak beginnings, I'd bet that basing this series on the established characters of a film helped Stargate SG-1 get a running start. There were still some growing pains and awkward characterizations, but nowhere near as many as I'm used to from the other "Star" television franchise.
Things that did bug me a lot during this season:
To counter some of my own nitpicking, some things that I loved during this season:
Average episode rating for this season: 8.0 — honestly, truly, exactly that; no rounding. This almost never happens!
Even though Mischievous Kiss: Love in Tokyo is considered the first season of a larger work on western TV databases, I'll review it as a standalone series; this will go along nicely with MyDramaList and other sites that have season 2 listed as its own entry.
The first requirement for enjoying this live-action adaptation of Mischievous Kiss is a tolerance for hyper-exaggerated acting. The second is familiarity with manga and/or anime tropes, especially in the (romantic) comedy genre.
Seriously, though. The characters make cartoon-style facial and vocal expressions every few minutes. Naoki's mother, especially, must have stolen most of her acting inspiration from anime—but they're all guilty. Even Irie-kun himself follows a precise character archetype from the manga world; it just happens to be one that fits in with a western viewer's expectations of live-action drama.
If ojou-sama laughing ("the Ohoho") and/or Munchian expressions of surprise will annoy you, this is not a show for you. But if you can mentally separate the overly stylized performances from the rest of the acting, what's left mostly works well.
The third requirement for enjoying this show, however, is a willingness to hear the same background music over, and over, and over, and over again. In approximately 13 hours of "real" footage (not opening or closing credits), you'll find maybe half a dozen tracks. They are all extraordinarily recognizable, and used heavily. Sometimes several times in a single episode.
As both a musician and all-around "theater person", the repetitive music might be the flaw that bothers me the most about ItaKiss. To paraphrase an old saying about composers: the good ones copy; the great ones adapt. What I mean is that instead of pasting identical music all over the 13-hour runtime, I'd hoped for at least a few hallmarks of true score composition: repeated motifs with changing instrumentation that reflects the situation, the characters' moods, and the overall story progression.
The copy-and-paste approach to music that got used was the lazy (and cheap) one, unfortunately. Obviously it takes less composer, musician, and studio time to make one track that gets used a few dozen times, than it does to create unique music tailored to each scene. But the end result is worthwhile, in my biased opinion. I enjoyed this show despite the limited musical palette.
And yet, I still rated it 8.0/10 somehow. Certainly, like every other modern (live-action) Japanese drama I've seen, the cinematography is beautiful, even calming. I could steal some of those shots as video wallpaper for my computer. And in the end, to me, the most important part of any story is the characters. These characters—especially Kin-chan—are lovable and deserve attention, even if the production let them down a bit in the directing & music departments.
I'm leaving this comment here as a sort of backup. The same information is stored in my private notes on MAL, but Trakt doesn't support such things as private notes. I could make a private list and make this the description, but it's simpler to just attach a comment to the season itself. Any review I write will be posted to the main series page, but not (as I usually do for anime) here.
Original note text follows, copied verbatim from MAL notes except for escaping Markdown syntax.
History mess is probably corrected as of 2018-12-22. I decided to trust MAL (since I wasn't tracking anime on Trakt back when I watched Wolf's Rain) and shifted the played times for everything after the recaps back 4 episodes, thus marking the four recaps as watched and leaving the last episode of the main series and all four eps of the OVA marked unplayed. Since I have some vague memories of watching the recap episodes, this is probably as close as I'll get to the truth without a time machine.
Don't know when the below was written, though. It was probably at least a couple years old.
----
Trakt thinks I didn't watch the recap episodes (15-18), but did watch most of the OVA. Plex thinks (as does MAL at time of writing) that I never saw the OVA, but did watch the recaps and all but the final episode of the main series.
MAL is probably correct... But I'm not 100% sure to fix it at this moment.
Average episode rating: 6.61538462
This is another time that I won't round the rating up even though, mathematically, it deserves to be. Even though the series is enjoyable to watch, I wouldn't really call it "Good". The pacing is much too fast, and I never felt there were any real stakes to the story. It never seemed like Special Week really might not reach her goal; she just had minor setbacks. Silence Suzuka had a slightly better character arc, but it was no less predictable along the way.
I like to think this show could have been better in two cours. On the one hand, sports anime are not one of my preferred genres, in general. A two-cour anime about a sport I know nothing about would have been intimidating, and I probably wouldn't have started it on an impulse like I did. But the extra length would have allowed for more leisurely pacing that allowed time to show the girls' training work instead of focusing on races and rarely showing the long stretches of practice in between.
A longer series would have also let the audience get better acquainted with the characters. If your anime needs to put name cards on screen every time a character appears to make sure we remember who they are, you've either got too many characters or not enough time to introduce them all. Or both.
Average episode rating: 6.76923077
The writing is fairly good, though (at least on Crunchyroll with subtitles) the on-screen information is often presented so quickly that it's impossible to read without pausing and/or without missing dialogue/action. Presumably this effect is less of an issue for the Japanese version, though I actually didn't see any Japanese text on screen most of the time. Either Crunchyroll took it upon themselves to place so much information on screen, or they were sent source video without the Japanese text layered on so the frame wouldn't look awful with English text placed on top of existing Japanese info-dumps.
Most of my issues with the series are technical: simple animations, lots of repetition between episodes, and heavy reuse of animation segments even within the same episode. The germs' voices tended to be pretty same-y, too, with pretty much the same audio effect layer used for all of them (and not much variation in their lines, either).
If the show had gone on to a second cour it would have been a bit much. Aside from a special episode coming out over the upcoming holidays, I see no hint of a second season yet. If one does eventually happen, I'm not sure I would take the time to watch it. The formula has been pretty played out already just in the existing thirteen episodes, and the show would need an infusion of new characters and situations to make another season interesting.
Wow, I don't even have to do the math to get an average rating for this season. With 8 episodes rated 7/10 and 4 episodes rated 8/10, the arithmetic mean is just obvious: 7.33…
All right, truth time: The only reason it took me two years to finish this series was the misplaced hope that ArtClub (the fansub tag) would eventually release the last three episodes of ArtClub (the show) so I didn't have to watch Crunchyroll's subs. Despite releasing one more episode (number 10) after a seven-month hiatus, ArtClub (the fansub tag) ultimately never finished the series.
Today, twenty months after their last release, I finally gave up on ArtClub (the fansub tag) ever finishing ArtClub (the series) and just streamed the final two episodes on VRV. The completion time of 840 days isn't the highest on my list, but I was probably far more patient than I should have been in waiting for the fansubs to finish. Goodness knows the blu-ray releasers didn't wait for them (variously filling in the last two episodes from in-house translations and/or Crunchyroll's subs).
Honestly, it wasn't worth the wait. I should have just finished this show over a year ago. Since there has been no hint of a second season coming out, I'll have to read the manga if I want to continue the story… or what there is of one. And since I'm definitely far more interested in animation than in comics, that's probably never going to happen—so the anime will have failed in my case, in the sense that all anime based on manga or light-novel sources are ultimately intended to sell copies of the books.¹
The main downside of having taken so long to finish the series is: I don't really remember much about the first ten episodes. That makes it pretty much impossible to write a proper review, but I do remember enjoying the majority of the series. My episode ratings bear out that recollection, in that none of them fall below 7/10.²
So, I'll call ArtClub (the series; or Konobi, if you prefer) a solid 7/10 and just move on to more recent material.
Average episode rating this season: 7.0909… (Another repeating decimal?! Oy!)
Outsourced isn't always riotously funny—or even laugh-inducing at all—but that doesn't make it a bad sitcom.
Sure, I found a fair bit of the humor to be… well, flat, honestly. But I still eagerly looked forward to the next episode and used it as the carrot at the end of my sitcom rotation—motivation to get through the shows I enjoy less.
Despite the jokes falling flat almost as often as they landed, I could not help but love all of these characters. Since the series was canceled after just the one season, I guess finding other work the actors did will have to suffice until I'm ready to rewatch this show.
Is Outsourced full of stereotypes? Unfortunately, yes. The parts of this show that represent India's real culture are worth it, though you'll need some common sense (and probably an Indian friend) to tell them apart. I'm lucky to have frequent IRC contact with an Indian or two,¹ and whenever I suspected something in the show was simply drawing on broad stereotypes (which happens often), they helped me ground my interpretation of the series in reality. Big thanks to my friends across the globe for putting up with my questions!
I'm not going to bother taking an average rating for this show—partly because I didn't rate all of the episodes, and partly because I already know what I want to rate it without needing the starting point I get from calculating an arithmetic mean. (I started watching Akuma no Riddle 1,646 days ago. Wow. That was back when I preferred to separate Western media and anime on Trakt and MyAnimeList, respectively, hence my lack of episode ratings from early in the series. MAL doesn't really have those.)
This show is… OK. It's interesting enough, and the art is pretty good. Featuring a different character in each ending, with a unique song to go with it, was a nice touch, and isn't something that many anime do.
The story did go off the rails a bit, though, toward the end. I lost any ability to suspend my disbelief, and kinda just had to go along for the ride while trying to ignore all the plot armor and such. (I wasn't entirely successful in trying, at that.)
At some point I'll probably watch the special episode, but I doubt I'll update my review at that time. There's not much it could do to change my existing rating. Akuma no Riddle (no, I will not use the nonsensical English title) is a solid "Fine" 6/10. If I hadn't enjoyed some of the ride, it would score lower of course, but I don't regret finishing the series. It was a decent enough use of time.
Average episode rating this season: 6.96153846
It is a solid season, with only one episode managing to score less than a 6/10 from me. ("Second Sight" was really not good…)
I say that despite not rating anything lower than 6/10 in season 1, because I haven't technically rated all of the first-season episodes yet. And, actual ratings aside, season two just feels a lot more consistent overall than season one. The show, like all Trek series before and after it, only really started finding its footing in the second season, and didn't reach what I would call "greatness" until the third or fourth.
The real highlight of this season is the Dominion build-up, and how we go from hearing the name thrown around here and there to watching a Galaxy-class starship get destroyed mid-retreat by a now very determined new foe. I'd say the season was quite effective at priming the viewer's fear of the Dominion, the Jem'Hadar, and perhaps even the Founders (though we don't yet know that Odo is a Founder, so he's still cool). Part of me questions the plot-armor quality of losing an entire Galaxy-class ship and crew to rescue Sisko, but I do realize that this is 1990s Star Trek. It's as different from modern television as it is from the original series.
I seem to have missed rating 40% of this season (3 episodes watched before I started rating literally everything, and one that I guess Trakt didn't save the rating for due to a network issue), so I can't just take an average as a starting point for my season rating.
So let's go from the basics. I'm mixed on the format of the show—the ultra-widescreen video doesn't do much for me (though I get that the idea was to make each episode sort of a short film). Beyond that, I found the writing is kind of hit or miss. Some episodes treat their subject matter really well, and with great subtle humor, and others are just so out there with the jokes that I can't find the humor at all.
One solid reason to watch this show is the guest stars. H. Jon Benjamin, for example, has a recurring guest role—as himself. However, the show's occasionally gratuitous focus on the characters' sex lives can (and does) get in the way of otherwise great stories. (I level this criticism at American media a lot, don't I? Maybe foreign media that manages to tell amazing stories without showing characters screwing on screen has spoiled me.)
Ultimately I think this season is worth watching, and I might talk myself into watching season 2 at some point. But I won't rush into it. This season receives an arbitrary 6.5 from me, but rounded down for the issues I had with presentation.
Episode average rating for season one: 6.5625
Actual season rating: 8
I rounded this one way, way up for sheer enjoyment. Yeah, I rated some of the episodes pretty low for plot tropes or whatever, but the show has a ton of heart and a really likable core cast.
All signs point to Kevin being on the bubble for a second season, based on ratings, but I hope ABC gives this one a chance to go somewhere with everything it set up so far. And if they do, I also hope Dave returns. Some viewers didn't seem to like his character very much, but in my opinion his carefree, playful attitude provides a necessary counterpoint to Yvette's laser focus on the mission.
Were I to choose three favorite aspects of this show, they would be (in no particular order): Dave yukking it up while Yvette pretends to be mad at him; Reese being an insufferable teenager; and Tyler just being Tyler. Nate almost made it into that top list, but Chloe East stole his spot. I said it in an episode review, I think, but it bears repeating: Her character deserves more screen time to develop and grow as much as Jason Ritter's character has. All three of them, Amy (JoAnna Garcia) included, should get equal opportunity to shine. Ultimately it seems like the real point of the show is Kevin fixing his family relationships, so all of them need to grow together.
I really can't say much about this show, nor can I provide an average episode rating as usual. Back when I started watching R‑15, President Obama was just starting his second term in office. I'd only joined Trakt a few weeks before, and it would be two years before I started keeping track of anime here too.† My thoughts on the first nine episodes of this show are lost to time, because I didn't start rating every episode I watch until a couple years ago. Really, I have nothing to go on for giving this show a rating, but I can try to draw from the last few episodes, which I did watch today.
Fun fact: It took me 1,849 days to watch this show from start to finish, according to MAL. That makes it the top entry in my list of anime by time to finish by just over two years, well above Captain Earth (at 1,111 days) and Baby Steps (at 1,107 days).
Yes, I did decide to finally finish this anime because I started it so long ago. No other reason was going to motivate me. It's not great. R‑15 isn't even particularly good, and I really don't care for this type of anime. Of course, I learned that partly by starting—and then losing interest in—R‑15, so at least it was a learning experience.
But now I know. And since ratings are ultimately a tool to record what shows I liked or didn't, I award R‑15 a hearty "Meh".
† — I started off by tracking anime in the same place I always had, on MyAnimeList, and tracking everything else here. I'm slowly backfilling my anime history here, one show at a time, for lack of a script to do it for me—not that I haven't played with writing one myself.
For once, I got a terminating decimal average rating for a season: 6.5
I'm going to buck my own tradition and not round this one up to a 7. There's just too much that needs improvement. The humor doesn't really work in this format, and it's mostly low-quality jokes anyway. Almost none of the stories have a satisfying dramatic structure—whether due to rushed resolutions or lack of depth, there are never any stakes.
Star Trek developed (or at least, its spin-offs did) a wonderful way of getting the audience to believe that something could go wrong, that we really might lose one of our beloved characters if things didn't go just right. Sometimes it even seemed plausible for the entire ship (or station) to be lost if anything went wrong, or even the whole Federation. Even though disaster almost never struck, and the vast majority of Star Trek stories end in resolution and a return to (more or less—DS9 being the obvious exception in the latter half of its run) the status quo. Trek's writers used this to great effect over the years, because when the stakes got really high and the protagonists lost, it was that much more impactful.
So far, the crew of the Orville never loses. They somehow always come out ahead, almost as if by magic, and we the audience can see it coming light-years away. Aside from the lowbrow humor, that's the most detrimental flaw in The Orville's first season.
Fox renewed The Orville for a second season back in November, so it's reasonable to expect that we'll get to see some evolution of the concept whenever it returns (likely late next year, around the same time the first season started). If the show doesn't evolve in season two, I likely won't continue following it.
Average episode rating: 7.1333… (Why do so many of my averages end up with repeating digits?)
Yeah. That's fair. This season didn't feel as hard-hitting as previous years, and the constant focus on Trump to the exclusion of nearly all other weekly news items didn't help that. The whole thing felt like Trump's Week Tonight, frankly.
We get it, John. You like bashing The Donald. Find some variety in your material again, will you? The broken record routine is played out.
The highlights of Last Week Tonight this year were the revisiting of Net Neutrality; Oliver's interview with the Dalai Lama; Lord Buckethead; and the Equifax focus episode. Oh, and we can't forget the Catheter Cowboy. Those episodes were more like the show I discovered back in 2014 and decided to follow because it was funny and informative with a touch of ridiculousness.
Here's hoping that when the show resumes in February 2018, it regains some of its old balance and branches back out to more topics that don't involve our current president. And when it does talk about Trump (it's still OK, just not every week, mind), it would be kind of nice if the political slant wasn't quite so heavy. A show that makes like it's a news program should at least pretend to be unbiased.
It's so easy to calculate an average over a mere five episodes, but here I am, having lazily used Chrome's address bar anyway.
From an average episode rating of 8.2, I wholeheartedly bump this show to a 9/10. It's well deserved by the latter four episodes. The most Star Trek thing about this miniseries is that the "pilot" (not really) pales in comparison to the quality of what follows.
The biggest shortcoming of the whole production is Shatner's decision to sort of interview himself for his own feature episode. Sure, he used clips of other captains asking him questions to fill in some of the time, but a lot of 1x01 is contained in Bill's first-person voiceover. It doesn't serve his story the same way as it does the other four actors, and it's unfortunate just how underwhelming that makes the opener. In a perfect world, someone the likes of Gene Roddenberry would have been able to interview Shatner for his segment, but our world is far removed from that ideal.
For any future viewers who might look here before watching any of the show: None of the segments reference each other; they're all self-contained. Because of that, I can advise you to start with William Shatner (as one normally would), to get the abnormal episode out of the way first—then decide the order of the rest based on your preference. It might be best to start with your "least favorite" captain of the remaining four, if you choose to take this advice. If not, you'll still have a great ride watching in the intended order.
(Note: Cross-posted in the comments for both Season 1 and the series as a whole, for visibility, since they are essentially the same thing.)
Average rating based on all episodes: 7.9
This show deserves that and more. It's great in all kinds of little ways. I actually tried to watch the show as slowly as possible to prolong the experience. That there was only one season is such a shame!
Looking back at my ratings, there was only one episode out of the ten that didn't quite live up to expectations. Achieving 90% "Good" or better episodes is an achievement for any show, no matter its genre or country of origin.
The big thing with Time Taxi (also known as Great Selection Taxi in English, or Suteki na Sentaxi in Japanese) is that the individual episodes aren't necessarily meant to be memorable on their own. They all contribute to the experience of the show as a whole, building on what's come before to enhance (or twist) the overall effect.
Eda-san's incremental attempts to "enhance" the time-slip experience are hilarious. They get more and more ridiculous as the season progresses, and it's all because he's driving the latest Sentaxi model that eliminated the time-slip noise from the previous generations.
I also really liked how we gradually got to know more about the other characters that hang around at Café Choice. The show didn't try to introduce everyone right at the beginning. We found out who was who at the appropriate moments.
Fair warning for certain viewers: There's a considerable amount of "fourth wall" obliteration. If you dislike characters talking directly to the audience, this show will annoy you. Personally, I think breaking the fourth wall is great when done appropriately, and it is so done here. A tongue-in-cheek comedy like this (which it is—a 「ドラマ」or "drama" in Japanese television terms is a type of program, not a story genre) is perfect for that sort of aside.
(Cross-posted from season 1 for visibility, since additional seasons aren't likely to happen.)
Season 1 of a Star Trek series? Let me stifle this yawn so I can try to focus on the shallow characterizations.
I won't bother averaging my ratings for the season, partly because I didn't rate the first few episodes and partly because I already know what rating the season deserves. (Rewatching this season took me almost literally three years because there was a long period where I didn't have access to my Trek collection. Back when I started the rewatch effort, I wasn't rating individual episodes the way I do now.)
Actually, in true Trek fashion, the pilot episode of Voyager is almost cringeworthy. It always reminds me of "Encounter at Farpoint" that way. None of the characters seem like themselves (as we'll get to know them later), and the whole story line is just… so contrived. But bad pilot episodes are as much of a Trek trope as the number forty-seven; as viewers, it's our duty to just get past them.
Over the course of the season, a few lucky characters (the Doctor, Tuvok, maybe Torres) get the luxury of some quality (or less so) character-development episodes. Most of the characters are just as flat now as they were twelve hours ago—but it's not really fair to insist that every character should have been fleshed out in a shortened season like this, is it? (We can dream, but let's face the reality that they really didn't have time to flesh out all the characters and tell Trek-y stories in just 15 episodes.)
I'm left with the impression that a lot of Voyager was shot on cornbread, but aren't all Star Trek first seasons corny as hell? What's more worrying is the disregard for technical correctness that seems to slip in alarmingly often in this season, and the wacky story ideas that just don't feel tonally appropriate.
Episode rating average: 6.76923077
There's something missing that keeps me from giving this a full 7. Sometimes there are scenes that don't seem to have a point, or incomplete thoughts that never get resolved. The CGI is kinda cringe-y, too, but outside the OP it only happens in a few places during performances.
More than the quality of the writing, I'm kind of disappointed in how generic the music sounds. Given that this is a Bushiroad project—you know, the company that put out Love Live!—it's surprising how similar all the bands sound. Granted, it makes more sense in this series than in Love Live! that there's instrumental music at all, since the girls are actually playing instruments on screen. But maybe that's limiting to the sound they can get. Bands made up of teenage girls with keys, drums, guitar, and bass can only sound so many different ways. They can't even throw in low voices to break it up, because there are no boys in any of the bands that perform at Space.
When producing a music anime, making the music catchy and memorable is kind of important. I'm afraid none of the songs in this franchise are anywhere near as memorable as what Bushiroad put out in Love Live!. The tunes are groovy enough, but they don't have much sticking power, not for me anyway. (If I sound like a LL! fanboy, I freely admit that I'm still an active player of its mobile game three years on. But it's kept me around with really, really good music.)
Episode average: 8.230769230769231
I'll give it an 8.
There was something missing in this season, I felt. Somehow it managed both to raise the stakes and lower the "compelling factor". I'm still really happy to have high production value sci-fi on TV, and will be watching season 3 of course, but I hope the series returns to the feel of season 1.
What is it about space shows that makes them so interesting? Even when an episode seemed relatively pointless, plot-wise, it was still just a treat to see all the space stuff.
I realized during this season, after visiting Kennedy Space Center at the end (and thereby delaying my viewing of the last two episodes due to being out of town), that not as much of the tech in this show is as far-fetched as it might look. The Saturn V / Apollo building at KSC has an exhibit remembering the crew of Apollo 1, and it integrates transparent display glass not unlike the large control panels we see in The Expanse or the rebooted Star Trek films. It's not a big stretch to imagine that tech being shrunk down for use in handheld tablets/phones. (Certainly, we'll develop that long before the Epstein Drive.)
Time to seriously put the Expanse books on my reading list. I've been lazy about reading them, even though I've wanted to since season 1 wrapped, and here we are at the close of season 2 still with zero pages read…
Overall, I think this season was probably done slightly better than the last. The expanded field (from 32 to 48 contenders) allowed a lot more variety, and seemed to contribute a certain unpredictability to which bots got matched up in the early rounds. Balancing that out was the selection of some pretty weak designs. Bots like Escape Velocity and Chrome Fly had essentially zero chance against any of the really solid machines that made up most of the field. Even the producers tacitly acknowledged that not all of the picks were worth watching, as they trimmed out several fights in the early stages of the tournament—especially the qualifiers—to save screen time. (Whether they cut the right fights is up for debate. Having seen several of the ones they nixed on YouTube, I recall a few of the aired fights being much, much less interesting than some of what ended up as YouTube-exclusive material.)
Some things didn't change, like the amount of fluff overhead it took to get into and out of a three-minute (or less) fight. They really would do better talking more about the robots and the technology, and dispensing with the celebrity commentators. I heard there were actually technical segments that got cut from the previous season (with Bobak Ferdowsi as technical correspondent), and it's shitty that ABC thinks this show is strictly reality TV. But instead we get theatrics as the teams make a show of pushing their "Ready" buttons, and bad puns from Faruq's introductions.
If they filled the time with more useful content, BattleBots could be truly great. (I know that 8 = "Great" in Trakt parlance, but that's rounded up from 7.77, somewhere between "quite good" and "darn good".)
