Shout by Saibagen
Now if they don't change their approach we, the viewers, might end up having to forget the show and the channel would be forced to cancel it.
It's a dead end;
viewer loves show X- channel's happy and changes script for the next season adding more unlogical soap opera shit- viewer stops watching = amazing show becomes a pile of shit, an Epic Fail. X.XI want to see another X seasons, but c'mon, cut the soap opera shit. There's been little to no progress this season. 5 minutes progress- the rest is soap opera a la Bold and Beautiful.
I can live with soap opera, I like a reasonable amount of soap opera but make it interesting, show us character backgrounds etc..... instead of killing the show.I've high hopes for episode 9 of S4. Trailer looks good...
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@saibagen I agree, the soap opera interludes are why I stopped watching it sometime during the first season. The story (which is why people are watching it in the first place) doesn't move along.
Jericho is getting the same way after about eight episodes. Three soap operas in progress now, and the main story just didn't move along in the last episode we watched. When even my wife comments on it, I know my observation is valid on that point.
Shout by Durack
Read what a Colour Revolution is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution) and you'll realise that George Floyd and BLM were pawns to orchestrate one in the USA.
It's ironic that a regime-change mechanism designed by the USA (to be used against unfriendly foreign regimes) was used against her own people, to change the Trump-regime. Those of us living today (in 2022) are witnessing the end of the US empire along with her Western allies. Their own citizens are leading the destruction, same as it was in Libya, Iraq etc.
This documentary only covers the Floyd/BLM/Identity-Politics arch of the Colour Revolution, told from a political commentator's point of view. At this point in time there are multiple story arcs in play, that involve the western financial system, energy supply, food supply and national security. It is my estimate that this stage of the revolution will continue for at least the next two years. The next milestone is the 2024 US election.....
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@durack Good observation and comment.
I absolutely love this style of SciFi, in the vein of Doom Patrol and Legion. I didn't read the comics so I was coming to this fresh. 1st Season was good if not a bit slow, but that's ok, because character development is important. The story, production, and acting were good enough. Of course we had to have the beginnings of "the Message" by-lining the story, but it was do-able. Season 2 started to show it's cracks. The writers had to get the story more convoluted which is on par with hollywood/netflicks but all in all was fairly watchable. My only complaint was how disgusting Ellen Page was. She looked and acted 1 dimensional. Her physical appearance was hideous. She detracted from the show in a big way. Especially as a lot of the main plot was about her.
Which brings us to season 3. How interesting that between seasons, Ellen magically became Elliot and her character becomes so much more likeable and attractive compared to the S2 Vanya. It was absolute nonsense. It ruins shows like this because catering to some narcisist who wants to trumpet the message by writing it into the script is utterly ridiculous. None of the characters even blinked at it as if that's normal is laughable. Besides all the woke messaging, the other part that was hard to get behind was the artificial conflicts. This season was especially bad and it just didn't fit with who these characters were. I don't know. It left me feeling like, "hurry up and lets end this!" I did think it was good that there was resolution to the story so hopefully I don't have to continue watching.
TLDR: Starts off well, slows and wanders, ends decently. Lots of "the Message" involved.loading replies
@ranchpig Thanks for the woke warning. I'll pass on this series.
First season was great, 2nd got quite convoluted but good. S3 is goinv woke thanks to the Vanya character now turning into a transman or whatever so ruining the plotlines and character that we saw uptil now. Genderswap/mpreg was alwatys acceptable when it remained fantasy/fiction & imagination of fans but you want to force people to believe that Females can turn i to Males and Males can turn into Femn ales and therefore I must believe that Ellen Page is truly a Male / Man character and in real life - F*? off. The only reason I will give S3 a chance is because I still love all the other characters and am curious about their kourney - Ellen Page is just a faker who wants to bring her real life delusions into a fictional show. The writing wqa quality is about to go down in S3 and expect some confusing bulls*t of pronouns being thrown around when EP is aroiund.
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@fan420 Thanks for the woke warning. This has become standard operating procedure for quite some time: Get viewers hooked on a show. > Then ambush the viewers with woke DEI crap, sexual deviance, interracial sex, whatever.
I wish I knew the details of exactly how this works (being a "fly on the wall," so to speak), but it must be that the woke networks, or whoever, are strongarming the writers / producers of successful shows to do this, under threat of cancellation. Jesse Jackson started shaking down corporations as a racial scam, as exposed in 2003 in the book "Shakedown" by Kenneth R. Timmerman. The woke ideologues have apparently learned from Jackson.
Shout by Saint Pauly
The main message is the film is, "Yes the Armenian genocide was serious, but not as serious as this melodramatic love triangle!" WTF?!
To use the attempted extinction of a race of people as a backdrop for a romance is criminal. The subject merited a 3-hour, big budget epic film rather than whatever this was.
P.S. If you do see this film (and you have no one to blame but yourselves), wait around for the credits to listen to #ChrisCornell singing the film's theme song, 'The Promise'.
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@saint-pauly good criticism of the film's misguided priorities
Review by JackDoddy
I remember thinking this was about as good as an action TV show could get. The action scenes weren't over-the-top pantomime, and the characters meant more than just "he's the one who is good at sniping" or "he is good at blowing stuff up". I have now rewatched it, and it's brought up many thoughts that I wasn't expecting.
I first watched it when I was coming out of school, maybe 17-20ish, so I was anxious about rewatching it this year (2022). This show was written at an interesting, and, in retrospect, scary time in American history. Over-the-top jingoism has always been a trait of American culture, but this era is seeing a change we'd not seen before, at least in the past 150 years. This show is set too far from 9/11 to be able to excuse racism as trauma, but the media was beginning to accept it as commonplace once again. The 'PC culture' of the 90s (that didn't exist, but hey) was gone. This is when America's journey of splitting into different cultural worlds was completing.
The extremist right-wing, pro-military 'patriotic' part of the country separated itself from the entire rest of the world. They put themselves into a bubble, then later complained they were in a bubble. As we've seen, what that culture has evolved into can only be described as bonkers, going from glorifying patriotism to literally attempting a coup on the country they're meant to care about so much. I bring this up because any TV show that glorifies the military and violence from this era could be a terribly uncomfortable watch once I take my rose-tinted glasses off and look at it with wiser eyes. It certainly wouldn't be the first time.
The Unit doesn't hold up, either then or now. However, it holds up a lot more than it should. The tl;dr of this unnecessarily long essay that nobody will read is that The Unit is still worth watching, or rewatching, now. Just keep in mind the setting and notice that it's surprisingly restrained compared to what they could have gotten away with. That makes it watchable, interesting, but flawed.
As I watched, I was thinking about the missions they were trying to complete. Multiple fit in with what was happening at the time, you could go down some serious rabbit holes with them. Ultimately, who cares, just suspend disbelief, and enjoy the ride.
However, the majority bordered on problematic. Some, I'd argue, were necessary in a pragmatic world. You need to save someone, diplomacy has failed, time to send the scary men with no names. That was not where it stopped, though. Meddling in the domestic affairs of other nations was a common theme. Americans seeking to change other countries through violence is... questionable at best. In more cases than not, if you wanted to reduce the situation down to a binary, the Americans were the bad guys, and yet you felt like you were in a propaganda film trying to rewrite them as good.There were multiple moments where they said, 'we are soldiers, we don't make decisions, we simply enact the decisions of others'. That's a fair point, at the end of the day the soldiers are doing an incredibly dangerous job on behalf of people who may have motives and reasons that you don't even know about. You can't make a moral decision based on the mission you were given. But sometimes you can...
To their credit, one character later in the run does begin to realise this. He realises that no matter what the higher-ups are planning, the ends can't justify these means. Without spoiling it too much, others try to talk him down, but he sticks to his guns. It's a courageous piece of writing in a show that was quite heavy-handed up until them.
Ultimately, that might be a decent reflection of secretive units like this. They aim to kill everything about you, except the biological you. They build you back up as a murder machine with little ability to survive in the real world. They use you until you're burnt out, then throw you away. Over time those who manage to can mentally recover, but slowly. Through the show you meet men who are emotionally stripped bare and live a sad life, unable to connect with anyone, but it’s unquestioned or he’s okay because he’s a hero. Ultimately, the one who walks away cannot justify doing horrible things while risking leaving his family without a father, especially when the military has no interest in supporting your family after your death or disability.
In my opinion, this is the real story of this show. He's the main character, building incredible skills, doing incredible things, before realising none of it is worth it. That's what makes it rewatchable to me. Without this through line, this would simply be an action series that aged poorly.
Two final points - there is racism. Nothing specific, nothing targeted at an individual, but a lot of insinuation that the people they are fighting are savages or can't handle running their own country. Brown people are killed and thrown away as if they don't matter… because they don't. It is rarely discussed that any dead enemy is an actual human with a life as complex and interesting as the man who fired the gun. They are simply removed without consequence when the narrative slows down or as a prop in the story of an American. It's not unsurprising, this still occurs today, but it needs to be mentioned.
Finally, people tend to complain about the 'at home' element. First, obviously, religion plays a pointlessly large part, offering nothing to the characters, and all families must be 1950s nuclear families. Anyone else is considered weird, including the characters who aren't in relationships, and they tend to meddle with anyone they believe is wrong according to their religion. This could be considered realistic, expected even, largely because of the show’s targeted demographics on CBS.
The problems they encounter can be uninteresting. When it’s not bordering on a soap opera, the wives sometimes have side adventures that cause them to complain about anyone who protests putting their husband's lives in danger and/or the military in general, but simultaneously complain about their living situation. Families are a liability to the military, something they do because they'd have no soldiers without putting in the bare amount of effort. Part of the wives’ roles on the show is to defend their own terrible circumstances, and act as political mouthpieces that seem clunkily hammered in.
All of that said, you need a reason to care about the shooty bang bang hero man, and shows that even a man who has gone through the hellish process of having all personality stripped from his character, that emotion still endures and can effect their job. I think the family perspective adds more than people might first realise, especially the character who can’t justify leaving his family, but I wish it was done a lot better. The show would be worse off without it, but it’s the bare minimum.
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Your review could have been much better, had you not projected your ideology into it.
So, while mommy and daddy aren't on board, Spock decides to follow a distress call by La'an to a dilithium mining planet the Klingons and the Federation are sharing.
The plot itself was okay, but I could have done without the overdosed on stimulants fighting sequences with M'Benga and Chapel. They were overly long and made me wonder if there's some kind of ego-shooter game planned based on this episode.
Some people can't exist without war... but war might be brewing elsewhere.
Could have done without Spock tearing up - although maybe that's due to being hungover on Klingon bloodwine, who knows. Anyway, could have done without the Spock/Chapel angle. I liked the way it was done so far, a little bit of tension here and there, actual fondness, but don't throw it in my face like that.
About Spock (once again) hijacking the Enterprise... at some point this becomes repetitive, even though it was done with a sense of humour. But honestly, hijacking the flagship should have some consequences, regardless of the outcome.
Overall, a rather mediocre episode due to some questionable editing choices.
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@nicky2910 I appreciate the time and thought you put into this. Thanks
An entertaining if slightly odd beginning to season 2. It was nice to see a shift in focus to other crew members, even if that choice felt kind of jarring as a reintroduction to the show. Side-lining Captain Pike was quite bold and honestly I missed his presence, but giving a chance for Spock, Chapel and M'Benga to have centre stage was also rewarding.
Still, I found this whole episode to feel like it was throwing us into something that was already progressing and it was a little difficult to stay fully engaged with it. There was a whole backstory to the situation and characters on Cajitar IV that was reduced to fleeting dialogue, instead trusting us to just go with it and not worry about the details. I felt that could have been handled better. Obviously this episode drew from the Klingon War that happened on Discovery, and featuring its repercussions so heavily here required a shift. The deep trauma that M'Benga and Chapel seem to have experienced came out of nowhere and fundamentally altered their characters. It was great material for the actors to work with, but flew in the face of what they've established previously.
It also led to the scene which was the weakest part of the episode for me; an extended action sequence in which Chapel and M'Benga expertly fight their way through hordes of Klingons with the assistance of a drug. Exciting, yes, but tonally bizarre and again not fitting the characters. This was WAY over the top, leading to M'Benga torturing a Klingon.. Again, wrong tone.
Thankfully there was a lot of great stuff outside this. La'an has really come into her own and felt like a well balanced character here. And Spock got all the of the episode's best moments. It's great to see him playing the lute and being in charge. We're going down an interesting narrative path here with his losing his grip on his emotional stability, and honestly I'm quite up for it thanks to Ethan Peck's wonderful take on Spock. Yes, we're edging on breaking canon in several areas here, but I'm really not that worried if I'm enjoying what I'm seeing.
Overall, this episode felt kind of unsettled and over-enthusiastic in it's return, but I'm in.
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@lefthandedguitarist I appreciate the time and thought you put into this. Thanks
Well here we go again... Probably be better titled
Star Trek: Strange.First, I was happy they made the doc more understandable, reduced his accent a little and slowed his conversation. But, that was the only thing I could praise.
I didn't last 20min before sitting this garbage down.
(There must bots giving this crap a good review score, 43 @ 80% ... you're kidding right!?).So the very first episode of season 2 we have Pike leaving Enterprise and the crew (may as well call it an all woman crew because Spock just lost his balls somewhere around Enterprise.
So they take Enterprise while it's in space dock getting fixed and maintained, it supposed to be there for another 3 days, yet they decide to run away with it and take their time about it.
Spock no longer seems worried that he is continually being started as a human, he's anxious and his emotions are like they would be confirming his balls have been excised, making it an all girl crew.
And to rub salt into that wound Spock decides his 'thing' will be nothing Vulcan-esk but
'I would like the ship to go... Now'
That was it for me - enjoy wasting time with this trashpile. 'Punch it'loading replies
@tropolite I appreciate the time and thought you put into this. Thanks
Review by callie_jennings
In 1966, just under half of US men had been (or were) in the military. In 2018 that was one in eight. (Figures for women are harder to come by and compare. Nine of ten veterans were men in 2018, and the total was about 7% of the population) It might be the case that the average American is more familiar with the command structure and norms of Starfleet than that of an actual military operation.
When Spock hijacks the Enterprise in TOS S1E11, viewers understand the stakes are incredibly high. They have a sense of the consequences of violating orders.
When Spock hijacks the Enterprise in 2023, after having done it four? five? times in television and movies "before" (to us, "after" to him), after decades of us watching Starfleet officers ignore protocol whenever they think it's the right thing to do and be rewarded with the highest ranks in the service for it, when most of the audience has no real-life sense that insubordination is serious, there are no stakes. Even within this episode, we're cued that there are no stakes - none of the rest of the crew seems shocked, none of them even consider not going along with Spock's plan.
The whole episode is like this. We spend a bunch of screen time on the Spock/Chapel relationship with no sense of what makes it interesting, with no stakes for it. We're introduced to a new chief engineer who gets to be somewhat charming and mysterious but doesn't actually do anything - whose only effect on the episode is to further reduce the stakes.
This episode contains maybe the most boring CGI space dogfight of this century and a bunch of completely nonsensical camera tricks. It has no sense of pacing or emotional arc.
"I would like the ship to go. Now" is a good line, though the comic timing is wrong, with too much anticipation.
Onitra Johnson's dialogue is solid and true to character. But the Swiss-cheese plot outline and the long-burn relationship beats are a total mess - given the mechanics of writer's rooms that's probably not Johnson's fault (although really great execution in the writing might have been able to paper over more of the problems). Director Chris Fisher also delivered probably the worst direction in SNW S1, in that season's final episode, along with a couple episodes of Inhumans that are the worst television I sat through in my adult life (sacrifices must be made when working on a Marvel game). There's lots of talent evident from the rest of the cast and crew in this episode, but it can't make up for the directing and showrunning choices.
Worse than any of the Season 1 episodes, comparable to a mediocre Voyager ep.
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@callie_jennings I appreciate the time and thought you put into this. Thanks
Shout by TV Watcher
Best show on TV. You relate to all the characters, you like almost all of the characters, the story is fun and when it's serious it is interesting. Apple wokeness is not present whatsoever (yet, they'll f*ck it up soon enough) and you aren't force-fed politics - and it's about the only show on TV that just leaves agendas at the door and entertains you.
Given the massive success of this show, you would think that Hollywood would stop putting out propaganda, but that's not in their nature. They would rather have hum-drum shows that you end up hating because of politics than entertaining shows that people love.
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@tvwatcherdenver I've read other reviews saying that subsequent seasons did indeed fk it up as you suspected. I'm just curious. What do you think now, after watching more episodes since your review?
This season isn't as good. I will blame the woke movement on that... Years ago I wouldn't care and would just watch and enjoy shows, but today with woke being shoved down our throats, I cannot help but be tired of the movement. It's backfiring. I am done with woke story lines. I seriously have no issues with gay people and wish happiness for everyone, but please please please stop shoving wokeness down our throats! we are all getting tired of it.
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@darthunderpants Thanks for saving me the time with your warning. I'd like to see series and movies called out more often for drawing people in with entertainment, and then "bait and switching" to a woke / P.C. message. It's insulting.
