Best season in years!! I can't believe all that shit happened in just one season lol. The Walking Dead is BACK!!!
It wasn’t as good as some of the other seasons, we didn’t really need it, but it was a nice goodbye and I’m glad we got it.
Great in some parts, weird and disjointed in others. But at the center of it all is a spectacular hero and his relationship with himself and others.
It was supposed to be abstract. It was supposed to capture the threads of design and creativity which brings about the fabric of the final creation. These threads of design and art could weave anything from an automobile to building architecture, from typography to stage setting. At least that was my perception when I started watching the series.
It is exquisitely shot biographical portraits of people who are devoted to a particular art form. This makes it a story of the creator and not the craft. For example, we don’t understand in-depth about the framing and lenses and light and ISO, but we understand more about Platon’s inspiration of choosing photography as a career and his personal creative process. Similarly, we learn a lot about Paula Scher and her love towards typography but very little about humanist, modern, sans serif and serif typefaces.
The series does not then remain abstract but becomes a concrete manifestation of abstract principles, as seen by some of the industry stalwarts. Is that bad? Not necessarily so, but it is definitely not what I expected out of the series.
I am reminded of a quote commonly attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, “Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people”. This does not mean the people are not worth discussing, but it limits the narrative with personal boundaries. I expected more from a series titled Abstract.
Average episode rating for this season: 7.428571…
The series ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. No surprise that Ted Danson wanted to move on with his career after eleven years of playing this same character every week, but it seems the showrunners really struggled with the story for this one. They made big life changes for almost everyone in the main cast either in the finale or leading up to it, but resolving Sam Malone's arc eluded them. In the end, what should have been a natural time for him to sell the bar (again) and make a new life elsewhere turned in on itself and he didn't get to change.
