Lydia Mitchell

Spoiler

Kind of a strange twist on the, "axolotl tanks," from the, "Dune," series of books. I wonder if it was intentional.

There's a scene where Lucy goes to level twelve. She watches a VCR tape. A pregnant woman is show to be strapped to a metal table in a tank of water. She gives birth to a dozen or so, "Gulpers," which proceed to eat her. In the show, "gulpers," appear to be genetically mutated, "axolotl," which are an amphibious salamander native to the underground waterways of Mexico City. Axolotl's distinctive gills are located outside of their bodies.

Double Spoiler

In the series of books by Frank Herbert referred to as, "The Dune Trilogy," there is a race of men known as the Bene Tleilax who are famous for their cloning technology. They can create a clone from just a few cells of a cadaver which can later recover their full memory[1], or create, "Face Dancers," among other things. It is eventually discovered they enslave their females, whose wombs are used to grow the clones in. Thus, the name, "axolotl tanks" of Tleilaxu.

I understand in the game "Fallout 3" the "gulpers" with fingers in their mouths are mutated salamanders, but in the T.V. series they appear as axolotls. I am guessing a writer is a fan of Dune and changed the salamanders to axolotls to create a, "literal," axolotl tank. Kind of a creepy homage to just as creepy an element of the Dune trilogy.

[1] In Dune lore the full memories of you and your ancestors are encoded in your DNA at a cellular level. (It's Science Fiction, and just supports the real thrust of the story. Spoilers, it's a story about how you shouldn't trust charismatic leaders.)

[6.8/10] I want to cut The Crown some slack here. If it followed Queen Elizabeth’s life long enough, it was either going to have to recast or start using an array of prosthetics and old age make-ups. Either option comes with significant drawbacks. I love Olivia Colman in everything from Broadchurch to The Favourite. I’m a fan of Helena Bonham Carter’s work with Tim Burton and beyond. I...vaguely remember Tobias Menzies from Game of Thrones. Regardless, the creative team made the right call here.

And yet, it is undeniably jarring to go from the performers who’ve embodied Elizabeth, Philip, and their coterie for twenty episodes and move onto an almost entirely new cast. The production is the same. The sets are the same. The writer is the same. But there is an undeniable disconnect from episode 20 to episode 21.

It’s understandable, and well within the realm of willing suspension of disbelief. “Olding” cheekily makes reference to it with the Queen selecting a new portrait for stamps and currency that acknowledges the change. But it’s also hard to adjust on an emotional level to the fact that we’re only a few months along the timeline, but Claire Foy and Matt Smith are gone, and there's some veritable strangers wearing their clothes and living in their home. It will take some time to acclimate.

The Crown does its best to accommodate us. A surprising return from John Lithgow as a dying Winston Churchill provides connective tissue between one period of the show and the next. Colman’s Queen arrives to give her mentor one closing benediction, and a kiss on the forehead that mirrors the one he gave her upon his last departure. The icon’s death helps seal that we are at the end of one era and the beginning of another.

And, it must be said, Bonham Carter is the perfect casting to take the baton from Vanessa Kirby as Margaret. Beyond the physical resemblance between the two actors, Bonham Carter has made a career out of embodying the same chaotic, rebellious, off-beat energy that ran through Margaret’s veins in her performances as the Queen’s sister. Time will tell the tale, but at the jump, the casting directors nailed that one.

The problem is that, even if you can forgive the necessary but friction-filled transition of the cast, the writing here is below the series’ usual standards. Big picture, there's an interesting theme at play. The Queen is not a neophyte anymore. She listens to her husband, to her high society gossip mongers, and suspects that her new prime minister, Harold Wilson, must be a KGB spy. She’s confident in her political and social instincts after years on the job.

Only now, she discovers via her spymaster, that it is instead the art surveyor in residence at Buckingham Palace whom Elizabeth has been geeking out with, who has been doing dirty work for the Russians. The high society fops she’s been rubbing elbows with having been leading her astray, and the unlikely, comparatively salt of the earth economist she looked upon with skepticism is, unexpectedly, more on her wavelength.

There's something there! The changing of the tides isn’t just symbolized by Churchill’s passing, but by the arrival of the first Labour Party PM the Queen has ever had. Beyond her individual political affiliations, she’s only ever had Tory PMs, and in Winston’s wake, there's a certain comfort to that. Having that discomfort lead you astray, challenging your preconceived notions and forcing you to reevaluate your immediate reactions and maybe your broader prejudices is a good tack to follow with Elizabeth. It sets the season on a good thematic course as season three launches.

Hell, it even ties into the meta elements of the recasting. Baked into the story is the notion of giving new people a chance, even if they’re not what we’re used to, because they might surprise us with how much they’re on our wavelength. If the Queen herself is willing to expand her horizons and find common cause with a comparatively common man, who are we to turn up our noses at some new performers?

The problem is that even if the story is good, the nuts and bolts writing isn’t great. All of the scenes involving the spy mystery seem overblown and melodramatic, rather than elegant and/or naturalistic. This show’s never shied away from high drama before, but whether it’s breaking in a new cast or embarking on a new storytelling cycle, the delivery feels miscalibrated here.

More to the point, the episode’s dialogue is strewn with tortured, blunt metaphors. When Anthony Blunt, the double agent art historian, is giving his big speech before his arrest, he gives an on-the-nose oratory about truth that stings the ears. The Queen’s speech at his art event after the revelation comes down about palimpsests and the like, and double-identities in portraitures leads to painfully obvious coded exchanges with the appropriately-named Blunt expressing her distaste. And her closing exchange with Prime Minister Wilson about how numbers don’t mislead, but rather what-you-see-is-what-you-get, just like the man himself, could hardly be more ham-handed if the PM was wearing bacon-wrapped mittens.

Sure, there's some juice to Philip trying to threaten the turncoat to watch his back, only for the seemingly soft-spoken art dork to turn the threat around and intimate that he’ll expose Philip’s shenanigans with the Russian-entangled osteopath from last season, another piece of connective tissue. But the whole presentation of it feels a step down from the intimate, lived-in vibe The Crown managed to hone over its first two seasons.

With any luck, season 3 will find its sea legs again. Season 2 was already a bit of a step down from season 1, despite some major high points. You can tell that the show has already eclipsed its original premise. Reloading is a way to freshen things up a bit, but also a chance for things to go awry in a whole new way. The Crown has earned the leeway to figure itself out anew, but fresh cast or not, this isn’t the most confident start to the new era.

[7.9/10] I low key hate The Crown’s Philip. He insists on sending his son to a haven of cruelty that Charles is plainly unsuited for. He yells at him for being weak. He threatens his wife with a messy divorce over it all, after having cheated on her multiple times. Sure, he recognizes the bullshit around the monarchy better than most royals, and he’s got more than a few witty bon mots. But in the confines of the show, he’s a bad person.

And yet, through it all, he means well toward his son, and he is a fair bit better father than he ever had. “Paterfamilias” is a tough episode to watch, because you feel for the show’s version of young Charles. As my wife pointed out, he’s of a piece with the subject of Saturday Night Live’s “Wells for Boys” skit: shy, sensitive, and bullied at every turn. Seeing him subjected to such cruelty by one parent, who puts his foot down and threatens to destroy his marriage to prevent the other from putting a stop to it, is gut-wrenching.

But Philip isn't doing this to be cruel. I’m on the same page with him when he tells Charles that their life isn’t the real world, as servants cut his food for him. I understand his concern that sending his son to an uptight boarding school would produce a molly-coddled twit, unprepared for the rigors of the real world. The goal to give his son a crucible that will strengthen him, give him discipline, is not unreasonable, even the results are abominable.

More to the point, you feel for the show’s version of young Philip here as well. He too is a boy who faced difficulties in the way of bullying and separation anxiety. He too was treated harshly by the other boys based on who he was and where he came from. The experience was a miserable one for him too. And in the part we see, maybe the most miserable.

Because however rough Philip’s parenting is, he is Mr. Rogers compared to his own father. In a tragic series of events, young Philip gets into a scrap with another student at Gordonstoun, which prevents him from going home to visit his favorite sister over break due to his punishment. Without Philip coming to visit, the sister chooses to fly to a family wedding instead. And the plane she and her born mid-flight child take crashes, killing all aboard.

The boy blames himself. Rather than seeing this as tragic happenstance, his already wounded heart crumples to ashes. He reasons that if he’d behaved, he could have stopped this butterfly effect from happening. The scenes of this devastated child, suffering nightmares of his closest family member’s dead body, ready to do god knows what in the lake by his school, stopping and crying in the funeral procession, are truly harrowing.

But nothing tops the trauma of his deadbeat father, the one who’s supposed to have the adult wisdom to know this was a horrible coincidence and not the fault of an innocent child, laying the blame at his grieving son’s feet. The Crown’s Philip is a bad man. His father is a monster.

Thank god for Uncle Dickie. In past and present, the man is a saint. He is a release valve for Charles in the here and now, and he gives young Philip the support he needs in the flashback scenes. For someone presented as a conniving operator in season 1, he’s a remarkably kind and empathetic soul in season 2.

But young Philip doesn’t want empathy. He wants absolution. He wants penance. He wants to wring the guilt from his bones. So he finds salvation in his labors, punishing himself by building the wall whose construction was meant to be his sentence for fighting with his bully. In that, he breaks himself down, working himself to the bone, until he cannot help but ask for the assistance from his fellow students and headmaster. It is in that crestfallen moment, that Philip finds the strength, and the camaraderie, to build himself back up.

It is rousing, even inspiring in the moment. But in truth, I don’t love it. I’m amenable to the idea of letting people work through grief in their own ways. But the headmaster, who genuinely seems to care and to want to forge a better world, could do better than allow a traumatized young man to revel in an act of self-flagellation he doesn’t deserve.

Despite it all, the effort works, or at least works well enough, because there is an inner strength in Philip which, however lamentable, these sorrowful events bring to the fore. We see it in the cold shower scene, where Philip’s fellow students hype themselves up for two seconds of a freezing water wash, and Philip stands stoic beneath the spigot, proving his mettle to those who doubt them. He may want nothing but to curl up with his favorite sister, but that resolve is there within him.

It isn't in his son. I know little of the real Charles. But in the presentation of the show, this is a boy who is simply not built for this. He wants to make his father proud, but doesn’t have that same mettle, the same inner strength that simply needs to be summoned by the hard times to make better men. For a well-for-boys kid like him, the rigorous process is a futile one, and thus a cruel one, which results only in the suffering of someone not made for it who will fumble in pain for that which they cannot achieve.

Philip cannot see that. He can only see his own struggles, the way parents inevitably see themselves in their children, without realizing that this meat grinder is not the ladder out of them for Charles that they were for him. His intentions are noble and understandable , but at some point, to knowingly let it continue despite seeing the consequences, verges on abusive.

Uncle Dickie gives the cinch of the piece. He tells a young Philip that he may hate his father now, but that one day he will hopefully know what it’s like to be a heated father and yearn for forgiveness. Who knows, maybe Philip’s dad has his own complicated backstory to explain his actions. But he earns his son’s hatred fairly here. And whatever life raft Gordonstoun gave Philip in his hour of need, it produced a philandering scumbag who seems far less than a role model for anyone (in the show, at least).

But now he knows what it’s like to be on the other end, to hope that you’re doing the right thing and that one day your child will thank you for it, or at least forgive your mistakes born of good intentions. As the closing text tells us, Charles tried to do better for his own kids, but is having his own intergenerational struggles as we speak.

There is no perfect way to do this. Everyone makes mistakes in caring for the next generation. All we can do is strive to do a little better each time. I sympathize with the Philip of The Crown, for his unspeakable traumas and for his desire to give his son the same strength he forged through hardship in the frozen reaches of Scotland. But I sympathize more with a poor helpless boy, made to suffer cruelly and needlessly, as old sins find new purchase once more.

[8.2/10] I’m reminded of two pieces of received wisdom. “The grass is always greener” and “There’s no right way to be a woman.” “Dear Mrs. Kennedy” is an illustration of both ideas at once. Two iconic figures of the twentieth century -- Queen Elizabeth and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, are envious of one another’s lives, which spurs each to try to put down or top the other. But in the throes of the tough expectations placed on each, they recognize one another’s plight and find common cause, as one of the only two people who know what it’s like to be women in this kind of spotlight.

The episode writes it all on the screen a little too much for my tastes. Aside from the final scene, there's no internal thought either woman, or any character really, has that doesn’t get vocalized or beat the audience over the head with. But the performances are spectacular. Claire Foy is superb as always. Conveying Elizabeth’s self-loathing, her attempt at openness, her hurt quality, her triumphant joy, her queen bee preening, and her deep sympathy -- nothing’s too much for Foy. And guest star Jodi Balfour does a great job as Jackie O, giving the sense of her as the picture of glamor in public, but also a wounded dove behind closed doors.

But what I most like here is the trajectory of The QUeen’s feelings toward her erstwhile confidante and rival. The swings back and forth between hating and sympathizing with Jackie, trying to upstage her and trying to comfort her, in ways that feel true to the character and interweave perfectly with historical events.

You sympathize with Elizabeth when she gets a look in the mirror at the wrong angle on a rough day and starts to feel bad about herself. So when a woman comes to London who’s the same age, but who is the talk of the town for her beauty, charisma, and education -- three things that Elizabeth is already insecure about -- you can understand why she’s so put out. It doesn’t help when the Queen Mother and Elizabeth’s own husband fawn over Jackie. And while I think the show goes a little overboard in conveying the sense that Mrs. Kennedy is this adored object of fascination and desire, it soundly sells the idea of why Elizabeth would bristle at this interloper who seems to be everything she’s not.

And yet, if only to keep Jackie away from Philip, the Queen invites her closer, rather than pushing her away. There's a magnanimousness to Elziabeth here, allowing Jackie a certain intimacy despite the fear that this woman is outshining her, and her ignorance of decorum (watching the private secretaries balk at the Kennedys using the wrong protocols and titles was hilarious). They bond over mutual shyness, over being married to strong-willed men, over loving animals. With an olive branch, Elizabeth turns a potential enemy, someone she’s jealous of, into a friend she can relate to. If the episode had stopped there, it would have been good and interesting enough.

Instead, the pendulum swings the other way to devastating effect, when word gets back to the Queen about some harsh things Jakcie said at a local dinner party. (As an aside, I love the fact that Margaret is the one who stirs up trouble with all this, being practically vindictive in her efforts to undercut her sister’s joy.) By all outward appearances, Jackie betrayed the Queen and, as Elizabeth herself later puts it, “the spirit” of their interactions.

Elizabeth invites Jackie into her private spaces within Buckingham palace, the most inaccessible and reserved areas of her home, and Mrs. Kennedy’s purported response is to call it run-down and dilapidated. Elizabeth opens herself up to this stranger, and the report she gets back is of personal insults that cut her to the bone: about her age, about her “incuriousness”, about her responsibility for the declining state of the U.K.’s place in the world. The combination of envy and apparent camaraderie put Jackie in a unique position to wound Elizabeth, and the bombs she lobbed more than do the trick. Foy sells the hell out of the QUeen’s hurt to hear the report.

But Elizabeth doesn’t take it lying down. I’ll admit my ignorance of the big Ghana trip. I thought this was a plot that ended in, if not tragedy, than at least embarrassment. The Queen felt stung by being seen as a “puppet” and wants to upstage Jackie’s ability to smooth things over for the Americans in Paris. So she makes an ill-considered jaunt to an African country that's been sidling up to the Soviets in a bid that all of her advisors, formal and informal counsel against. Ghana President Nkrumah’s self-aggrandizing reception of her only further suggests it’s a grievous error and she’s being used.

Only then, she dances. I’ll admit, in an episode that's fairly blunt, it's hard for me to perceive how a simple foxtrot is able to win over Ghana’s leader back to the Commonwealth’s side. But as with the Kennedys, it’s a hoot to see stuffy British functionaries fret like schoolgirls over their beloved monarch daring to do a box-step. And taken generously, you can read it as the Queen being willing to show respect to another leader, relax and let out some of that personality that Lord Altrincham implored her to demonstrate. Even if it was mostly for show, you can see Elizabeth practically glowing at the gesture’s success, a subtle message to her arrival in Washington that two can play at this game.

Except things are not so wonderful for Jackie, despite Elizabeht’s image of her. That's what I most appreciate about the episode -- the reveal that each woman puts the other on a pedestal to some degree, and that each struggles to see the ways in which they’re both fighting against the same forces. It’s no coincidence that the direction and editing focused on Elizabeth during the Kennedys’ visit to London mirrors the direction and editing focused on Jackie at one of JFK’s speeches. The same subtle looks and worries about a wandering eye, the same fears that she’s being humiliated by her husband’s attention to their women, reveal that however much there's a perceived rivalry, Jaqueline and Elizabeth are in much the same place.

(As an aside, it has to be said -- I’m a big fan of Michael C. Hall from Dexter and Six Feet Under, but he is pretty awful as JFK. His accent sounds atrocious, and his acting style here seems dissonant from the other performers in The Crown.)

Jackie learns from her husband (who gives Philip a run for his money in assholery), that the whole Ghana trip was spurred by Jackie’s comments. Again, the show writes it all on the screen ehr, but I appreciate that knowing ehr comments got back to Elizabeth makes Jacki want to express her contrition.

The differences in presentation between the two women’s first meeting and their second is striking. The tour of Buckingham is reserved, intimate, personal. The latter reception at Windsor Castle is grandiose, formal, showy. One was to invite someone in. The other was to show off the weight of your office. This is Elizabeth not trying to be the bigger person, but instead to be the grander person, feigning an uncaring air about Jackie’s statements, even as everything from the dolled up guards to the formal tea service to the slathering of jam on crumpets screams “I’m confidently better than you.”

Only this time, it’s Jackie who opens up. She talks about her own hardships with Elizabth, intimating the troubles at home and the reason she was so apt to want to shine in Paris. She talks about the jealousy she dealt with from her spouse, with hints of abuse. She speaks of being basically drugged against her will, all giving Elizabeth an insight into the plight of this person whom she’d formerly seen as a mean demigod. And most importantly, for my purposes anyway, Jackie expresses her regret because of how much she admires Elizabeth -- for her grace, for her leadership, for being , in so many ways, all the things that Jackie fears she herself isn’t. There's a subtle implication that on both sides of the equation, these efforts to outshine or put down was a product of each woman looking at the other, and feeling less than.

That is profound and pathos-ridden. As I’ve said before, I see the central mission of The Crown to be to reveal the underlying humanity of these distant figures. And it’s hard to imagine what could do that better than showing that even these exalted, iconic women feel measured by one another, pitted against one another, envious of one another, when each is facing battles public and private that give them common cause and common understanding. It is, like so much on this show, a metonym for broader societal changes and societal pathologies that are still with us today.

The end result of it all is sympathy and a desire to support one another. It doesn’t excuse Philip, but I take Elizabeth’s quip on happiness to indicate that while she still bristles at Philip’s flirty behavior and general unruliness behind the scenes, she recognizes in Jackie that it can be worse. And so when those grim events of 1963 take place, she sees Jackie’s strength and defiance in the famous deliberate choice to wear the same outfit with her husband’s blood on it. She uses the levers of state to pay tribute to her and to her loss. And she writes a personal letter, not as a rival, but as a friend, as one of the few people who can understand what it’s like to feel the pressures of that envied but unenviable position, as an icon, and as a woman.

Therein rests the cinch. With the weight of gendered expectations, both of these admired women feel like they don’t measure up and yearns for the other’s life. But when they get to see it up close, truly understand what it entails, in the end, all they can feel is kinship.

[7.4/10] Everyone sucks here. Some people suck to varying degrees, but everyone’s in a bad way to some degree or another. It’s a weird episode, one that isn't bad by any stretch, but plays in spaces that don’t do as much for me as a viewer.

Let’s go with Tony, since he was prime on my hate train after his debut episode. Let’s list the shittery in (vaguely) ascending order: 1. Saying unkind things to Margaret when he knows she’s in a vulnerable place 2. Allowing for snipes behind her back 3. Marrying her just to earn his mother’s admiration and 4. Cheating on her constantly, to the point that he knocked up one of his friends, and didn’t say a word about it (so far as we know).

In truth, I feel a little bad for Tony. They give him some pathos here, with the revelation that he was the unloved son, left behind by his social climbing mother , with the implication that he was disdained for his father’s actions and for his disability which he hides. The guy is messed up from all of this, and it doesn’t excuse his behavior, but it helps explain it.

Margaret’s in the same boat. She says many an unkind thing to Elizabeth. She wants to have the wedding to end all weddings so she can top her sister. And while she never cheats (so far as we know), she’s essentially only getting married because Peter Twonsend is, and she wants to beat him to the punch out of a sense of revenge

But she’s also hurt,and people who are hurting do stupid things. She’s not wrong to be bitter at her sister, even if her words can be cruel. And the prospect that after everything else, Margaret had to wait six months to announce her engagement because Elizabeth is pregnant struck me as utterly absurd. The Church of England won’t let her marry? Stupid, but whatever, the Queen’s hands are tied. But some issue of “protocol” preventing dueling announcements is just ridiculous.

Suffice it to say, I continue to feel the way I’ve long felt about Margaret on The Crown -- that she’s an overgrown child in how she acts, but also one who has plenty of legitimate grievances and reason to feel sad.

That just leaves Elizabeth, who occupies her usual more ambiguous role here -- does she want to look out for ehr sister or support her, or knock her down as part of the cold war they’ve been having? It’s interesting to see her be outwardly supportive, but also watch Tony’s bohemian friends mock the dignity and tradition of the palace (which, in fairness, is something I’d probably do), and so look to nip this whole thing in the bud. Her hunting for dirt on her sister’s fiance allows her to occupy both spaces.

I’ll admit, I find the implication that the stress of finding out all the cruddy things that Tony has done causes Elizabeth to go into labor a rather odd thing. But the show does the ensuing sequence well, making points about the strangeness of the process to modern eyes without having anyone vocalize it.

I appreciate that, because very little in this episode is subtle. It lays on the bit with Tony’s issues with his mom very thick. It doesn’t hide the ball with Margaret’s motivations for the marriage in the slightest. And Elizabeth’s disgust for the whole thing is made pretty plain as well.

But what I do appreciate is the ambiguity of the closing scene between the two sisters where Elizabeth sidles up to telling Margaret what she knows about Tony, but can't pull the trigger. Some mean words are exchanged. Elizabeth rubs it in that Margaret could have had what she wanted but wasn’t willing to give up the privilege. Something tough but fair, which ties into one of The Crown’s recurring themes -- The Queen wishing she could just be a comparatively normal person and wife and mother rather than having to become The Crown. And Maragert turns the comment around, saying it’s ironic that her sister enunciates a desire to be invisible because e she’s somehow able to pull that off despite wearing the crown, a comment that ties into Margaret’s own need to “shine”, as her mother puts it, and her pride in doing so, that's been a recurring theme for her too.

Despite the harsh mutual insults, Elizabeth doesn't spill the beans on Tony infidelities. I initially took it as a kindness, or at least an act of measured forbearance. Elizabeth already feels blamed for the dissolution of Margaret’s first pseudo fiance. She doesn’t want to be the slain messenger again. And so maybe, she holds back because, even though she could blow up Maragret’s engagement and relationship, she doesn’t want to. She wants to let Margaret live her own life and doesn’t want to be seen as the culprit for another relationship down the tubes.

But my wife suggested a more sinister explanation. Maybe her non-commenting is a “you deserve this”-style fuck you to her sister. Maybe it’s not a kindness, but a means of damning Margaret to this life she’s defiantly choosing, with the knowing expectation that she’ll have to suffer the consequences for her own poor judgment.

It’s fair to read it either way, and in truth, there's probably some of each, which is a sign of solid character writing. This is certainty a strange episode, focused on more melodrama and adults acting like teenagers than The Crown usually indulges in. But there's also no one to quite root for, which is, in a story about the pampered clucking at the slightly-less pampered, usually a good sign.

[7.6/10] To quote an equally regal television program, Agents of Shield, it turns out that the former King Edward is a “big fat friggin’ Nazi.”

Frankly, the episode works better as almost a news program or a recitation of historical events more than a drama. I knew through cultural osmosis that Edward and Wallis had cozied up to the Germans in some form or fashion over the years. I did not know that they fed intel to the Nazis, that Edward wanted to be reinstalled on the throne as a puppet king, that they’d seen concentration camps and continued to sidle up to Hitler and company, and that he encouraged the Germans to keep blitzing his home country to soften them up for “peace.”

Fuck him.

If I haven't made it clear in these write-ups, I think it’s important to separate these historical figures as they appear in a television show that needs tidy stories and drama from their real life equivalents. I’m sure many of the events that The Crown depicts don’t align with reality, but take advantage of poetic license or the usual excesses of adaptation to make things more palatable and interesting. So when I gripe about Philip’s attitude or chuckle at Tommy Lascelles’ stuffiness or the like, I do so as though they’re fictional characters, in full acceptance of my general ignorance about the real folks.

But not with Edward. I’m no historian, but there’s credible information in the public record to support this. And even if the worst isn’t true, enough is damn the man. So fuck him.

Honestly, that's the most compelling part of “Vergangenheit”. This is bombshell information to ignorant Americans like me more than half a century later. The history comes alive from seeing the aghast reaction of the Queen Mother, or the events illustrated with Tommy’s voice over. Reaction shots and camera angles and haunting music help sell the magnitude of the reveal. But by god, the information itself is plenty.

The show does a good job of selling the magnitude of the information through the grammar of television long before we know the details. The Germany flashback is unique enough to catch the audience’s attention. And the urgency with which the details are raced from desk clerk to supervisor to the highest levels of government tell you this is some big deal stuff. Hell, the simple fact that they brought back John Lithgow and Jared Harris to reprise the roles of Churchill and King George is a sign. The way it’s talked about with wide eyes and hushed tones sacross the government really leaves you salivating to learn the facts, however horrid they may be.

But truthfully, the character drama doesn’t do much for me here. On paper, I think there’s something intriguing about Elizabeth being a devoted Christsian who wants to practice Christlike forgiveness and struggles to do so given what she learns. You can see her noble devotion to ideas of grace and second chances, and the comfort she finds in religion as a place where she doesn’t have to be The Crown, but can just be “another humble Christsian.”

I have a couple problems with it though. For one, her catalysts for all of this is Billy Graham, whom I mostly know for his antisemetic comments, and his stances against women’s rights and LGBTQ rights. So him as the humble bastion of piety from North Carolina who moves the heart of the Queen doesn't do much for me, and if anything, makes his counsel seem like snake oil. Now maybe that's the point. Maybe Elizabeth is swayed by this man’s decent words without knowing the dark parts of his heart the same way she was with Edward, but you don’t get many hints of that in the text.

More to the point, the dilemma doesn't resonate with me once we find out what she finds out about Edward. I believe in forgiveness and second chances. And still, maybe I’m simply not as pious as Elizabeth is, but it seems like an ethical slam dunk to basically excommunicate him given his crimes. I completely buy that Elizabeth would wrestle with it given her mentality, but it’s hard to feel that in the same way when I’m mainly just aghast at Edwarad’s sins. Hell, the second most I’ve liked Philip (after his penitent Xmas address from overseas) is him telling his wife that she 100% did the right thing, (and the Queen Mother and Tommy agreed over drinks, no less!)

The show does suggest a little divine retribution for Edward. Just when he’s positioning himself for a return to public life, just when he thinks he’ll be able to live a life of purpose again, this damning revelation spills out and dashes it all. I don't really feel for him, since my sympathy for those who sympathize with Nazis is pretty slim, but you do feel his ennui living a life of opulent dullery, a bored showpony paraded about in vapid social engagements.

That's the one area of the divine angle here that really works. Elizabeth cannot forgive Edward, but pray’s for him to recognize the error of his ways, that they can forgive themselves. And maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I take his sullen look in the mirror to be a literal reflection of that, a recognition that this is a mess he made himself, that if insipid card games, silly costumes, and dull parties are his personal hell, he punched his own ticket with his sins against country and countrymen. That is a sad fate, even if it’s a deserved one.

Anyway, fuck him.

[7.3/10] This is a weird episode. It seems meant as a resolution to the marital difficulty storyline that's been percolating through the opening of this season. The shit finally hits the fan, as the Parkers’ divorce goes public and suddenly the shining good feelings that seemed to wash over both Elizabeth and Philip are overwhelmed by the torrent of rumors and speculation that follows in that wake.

The problem is that The Crown all but gave away the game in the opening of the season. We already saw Elizabeth and Philip sniping at each other in the aftermath of all this as the opening scene of the season. So there’s not much in the way of dramatic tension here. We know that things will explode. We don’t know exactly how, but given what was set up in the prior two episodes, it’s not hard to guess. SO much of this episode feels like playing out the string.

There is some personal investment in seeing Elizabeth react to Philp’s affairs not just being a personal challenge, but now being a public humiliation that she’s forced to deal with and have paraded around in the papers. Once again, since The Queen must be reserved in everything, seeing Claire Foy emote or betray clear hurt, anger, and bewilderment as this state of affairs, while putting on an air of placidity on the surface makes for a masterclass of acting.

Otherwise, though, there’s a lot of shots of people looking pensive on beautiful vistas, or a score of grand drama playing over a tabloid newspaper story. As much as I admire the production design and impeccable cinematography of The Crown, it all starts to feel like a bit much.

I also find Philip’s reaction to Mike Parker kind of odd. The tenor isn’t “Well, we’re both shits and it got out. Sorry, but you have to take the fall on this.” Instead, it’s for him to chastise Mike for writing about it and “breaking the rules.” It’s not crazy behavior from a self-absorbed philanderer like Philip, but I don’t know. Something about the presentation makes it feel like the show’s on his side at least a little, and I have trouble sympathizing with the side of “Shame on you for writing an indiscreet letter that shined a light on our misdeeds.”

That said, strangely enough, I found the non-royal parts of this one much more interesting. I’ll admit my ignorance of modern English political history once more. But purely within the confines of the show, I find the persona of Anthony Eden fascinating. The idea that he wasted his best years in Churchill’s shadow, waiting for the man to retire, and by the time he was too desperate and in too ill-health to make an impact as Prime Minister is its own kind of tragedy.

Elizabeth seems to recognize that. And while the man’s fiery speeches show he’s already doomed, you get the sense that he was played by a conniving operator in Harold MacMillan, which only makes his downfall seem more like a sad end. Despite his flaws and mistakes, he gets a certain absolution from the Queen for his predicament, which makes us apt to sympathize with him too. It doesn’t excuse, you know, an unnecessary war and supply crisis that he had a firm hand in, but it makes him an interesting and pathos-ridden character on a personal level.

ALso outside of the explicitly royal circle, Eileen Parker is kind of my hero. I’ve made no secret of my disdain for prickly Tommy Lascelles. So seeing him try to come out of retirement to lean on ehr to delay making any public announcement of the divorce, only for her to tell him off as a shill and a sucker, is a hell of a hoorah for me as a viewer.

More substantively though, despite sympathizing with Elizabeth, I like the way she kind of tells of The Queen even more. I’ll confess, at one point in this episode, I told my wife that it was hard to take some of this interpersonal conflict as seriously as high drama when there are legitimate national and international crises going on just beyond the Queen’s windows. So there’s something roundly satisfying about the Queen personally asking this (I think?) commoner to delay her announcement as her favor, only to be told that she’s already suffered through years of any unhappy marriage as a “favor” t o the Crown, so as not to disrupt thing during Margaret and Peter’s to-do, and that Elizabeth is ignorant of how many such royal “favors” have wrecked lives and marriages to date.

I kind of love that. The interpersonal issues among the royals are interesting from a television narrative perspective. But I like Eileen’s part of this story as an acknowledgement and rebuke that such drama rests atop real people, who aren't insulated by the same kind of wealth and privilege, who have to live their far more regular lives in the shadow of the monarchy’s needs and pleasures. To have some say “enough is enough” and do what they need to do for their own sanity and well-being in that situation is courageous and low-key inspiring.

All that said, I do feel for Elizabeth in this. It’s not subtle, but I like the scene where she welcomes the new prime minister who laments “Eden’s War”, only for the Queen to balk a little, remind MacMillan that he supported the war, and make the point that one must “clean up their own mess.” She’s clearly dressing down MacMillan when she means to dress down Philip, who’s inconveniently absent. But I like that as a nice bit of psychological projection, showing how the personal bleeds into the political.

That said, I don’t know how I feel about the resolution to all of this. The conversation between Elizabeht and Pihlip in Lisbon is still an excellent bit of acting and dialogue-crafting. But it doesn’t have that much more power now than it did in the season premiere. We already knew that Philip had been having affairs. The firm details don’t matter that much. So while I don’t mind watching it again, it’s not as if the context changes much the second time around.

But what I find particularly odd is that the solution to the problem is...giving Philip the royal title of prince? Okay, I guess? The dialogue tries to dress it up, basically saying that Philip wants a title to command some respect from the palace stagehands who infantilize and micromanage him. But it’s a strange ransom to not cheat on your wife, especially since Philip seemed to already have his “Come to Jesus” moment about the error of his ways in the last episode.

I don’t know how it solves anybody’s problems. Maybe that's the point. Maybe it doesn’t, and we get plenty more of this stuff in the episodes to come. (I wouldn't really look forward to that -- three episodes is plenty.) But considering it’s the climax these three episodes have been building too, the connection between the marital issues the Windsors have been aching and the answer of basically giving Pihlip a promotion seems strained. (Plus hey, I’m sure it’s true-to-life, but it doesn’t help that Philip looks pretty darn silly in his floofy crown and furry cape.)

His closing conversation with Mike is a little more interesting -- an acknowledgement that a certain era is over. And the commentary about Elizabeth’s views of her children as mere appendages of the crown, reminders of her own death and replacement, is intriguing as a possible future tack toward exploring that part of her world -- something that's been mostly kept to the side until now. But the suggestion of more kids as a response to all this also feels like a peculiar connection to make.

Now look, this is history (at least kind of) not fiction. The writers are stuck with the events as they happened. But the way they draw lines between personal or psychological reactions and major public developments lacks a certain narrative catharsis. Framing matters. Juxtaposition matters. The suggestion of cause and effect matters. People are strange creatures. Their choices and reactions don’t always fit neatly into narrative boxes or straightforward plots. But as a three-episode arc at least, The Crown struggles to weave its historical facts into a comprehensible, meaningful, or complete story.

[7.6/10] It’s nice to get an episode focused on Philip’s personal journey. He’s had subplot before, but making him the protagonist for an episode allows the series to dig deeper, explore what’s going through his mind with more conviction. I haven't loved The Crown’s Philip as a person, but I have found him fascinating as a character: a compelling mix of personal shittery but professionally in favor of royal reform, with a good smartass wit to go with it. It’s too much to call him an antihero, but he has enough of a mix of good and bad qualities to make him stand out enough to support the hour.

What I find particularly engrossing about “A Company of Men” is that, by god, the time away really did settle Philip. I don’t know if it’s exactly in the way that either Elizabeth or the Queen Mother intended. But by hook or by crook, he comes back not merely chastened from the experience, but appreciative of what he has and even homesick. I imagine the real life Philp’s transition wasn’t nearly as neat or cinema-ready (if he had such a transition at all). But as a character story, I love the idea of someone going away only to realize the value of what they left behind.

To the point, as another character describes it, Philip and his private secretary, Mike, are on what is basically a “five month stag party.” They pal around with the seamen aboard the royal yacht. They canoodle with the local indigenous population, which is uncomfortable at multiple levels. They smirk through various official functions and make goo goo eyes at reporters and just generally act like frat boy pricks.

It causes trouble at home. And in an episode that puts the spotlight away from Buckingham Palace, it’s nice to see someone only tangentially connected to the Royal Family (at best) get to lead the B-story. Mike’s wife, Eileen Parker, has had enough and is ready to file for divorce, only to find that she needs hard proof of Mike’s infidelity or worse to be able to get one.

I like the choice to show her trials and travails to wrangle what ought to be hers by right on multiple levels. For one, it’s a fascinating case study of the institutional thumb on the scales of marriage in the 1950s. For another, it’s a good vehicle to explore the culture that permitted, if not promoted, this sort of behavior for powerful men and left few avenues for their spouses to do anything about it. For a third, it shows the royal apparatus that sees one woman’s visit to a solicitor work its way through a byzantine collection of amateur tennis players and ladies who lunch back to the Queen’s private secretaries. And it neatly sets in motion the letter that presumably set up the blow-up between Philip and Elizabeth that opened the season despite Philiip’s apparent change of heart at the end of this episode.

That change of heart comes from a reflection on his own childhood and difficult life that's prompted by the reporter who used some long distance flirting to set up a veritable journalistic ambush. I like the show highlighting the fact that Philip’s own father had his mother committed and then abandoned the family to take up with his mistress. The revelation both establishes that Philip didn't exactly have the best role model himself for being a good partner, and it forces him to reflect on how that situation made him feel as a son, in a way he doesn't want to repeat.

So when we see a little bit of nobility from him, using his status to rescue and return a local sailor, it’s cause to reflect. He sees a father welcomed home. We see him look at happy children, basking in joy with their parents. We see him...implied to take advantage of the indigenous’ women’s generosity. So it’s nice that the show doesn't simply pretend that he woke up one morning and completely changed his ways. But the experience gives him a lot to think about.

One of my favorite scenes in the show happens when Philip and Elizabaeth trade Xmas radio addresses. Both of them can’t exactly speak frankly with an audience of millions. But each also expresses their love and longing for one another amid their separation. The fact that they’re unable to connect by phone makes this one of the few opportunities to speak when they know the other will be listening. Philip speaks about his regret and missing his family, understanding what he has, even if it’s not in so many words. And Elizabaeth’s revised opening statement that basically gives him an open invitation, is reservedly and unreservedly sweet, in that characteristically English way. Taken with her note, it reminds him that whatever the flaws of the family he grew up in, he has a new one, and the chance for it to be a better one.

Obviously, there’s still storm clouds on the horizon. But despite the rocky waters to come, it’s nice to see smartmouthed, bristling Philip have a chance to pause, reflect, and reevaluate, and maybe strive to do better than his own father ever did for his family.

Heard of the 80/20 rule? Okay, let's park that til later then...

Julia Roberts was as big a female star as we'd seen back in 1997. That was her decade. From Pretty Woman to Notting Hill, she was the world's sweetheart. She had some stickers along the way but nobody held them against her. She was untouchable.

The best evidence of that is this film. She plays an absolutely atrocious bitch in it - yet... it's deemed fine because it's her.

Every decade has an actress who tries to out-do Katharine Hepburn. The sparkle of Bringing Up Baby is what the editor of this film is looking to capture. Roberts is gorgeous in that girl-next-door-with-a-million-watt-smile way. And Dermot Mulroney provides that handsome but dumb male lead that all good rom-coms cast.

The problem watching 20 years after the fact is that the character Julia Roberts plays is a grade A bitch. First round draft pick bitch. And it's impossible to forgive her for her actions.she spends 80% of the running time being atrocious and the final 20% is spent accepting her actions and allowing redemption - with completely out of character reactions to her terrible deeds. Believability = zero.

The film has some positive points - a crowd pleasing rendition of Say A Little Prayer (one of life's perfect songs). And the standout high point of the movie by a clear margin, Rupert Everett's portrayal. The saving grace of this film without question.

At its release I loved this film for its witty take on a romcom. Watching now is a tough task.

6/10

I'll start off by saying that I did enjoy this movie, and I'm satisfied with the experience it gave me.

Other than that, I'm a little disappointed in the way the story is told.

the first half of the movie is extremely confusing. The pacing is so fast, it felt like watching the trailer of the movie instead of the actual picture. It was such a bizarre experience, I really was wondering why was it going so incredibly fast, it was super hard to keep up and grasp all the info since I didn't actually know Elvis's story at all before this movie.

Also, the scene where he is walking on the street and Doja cat starts playing, no. Just no. It doesn't mix AT ALL with the rest of the movie, it's so out of place in my opinion. Thank God it was pretty much the only moment when they went modern with the music, the rest was kept in line with Elvis style.

So, first half of the movie, really confusing, most of the info felt like it was thrown at my face instead of told and the cinematography felt really intrusive.

Second half of the movie? It got better, because they actually took their time, focusing on less events and giving them their due screen time. Narrating stuff with more calm and detail, the scenes definitely felt more developed and important, the way the first half of the movie should have been told pretty much.

Overall it's a good movie, the story gives a decent look into Elvis.

The actor for Elvis is insane, he looks precisely like him, he acts and moves like him, I've seen videos after the movie and the amount of detail is insane.

It's a worthy experience, but the first half of the movie should really be slowed down A LOT.

Starts very well, the way they handle the death of Boseman is very tastefully done (so many well executed emotional beats) and I like the new conflict that they set up, which is a little more grey and intelligent than the usual blockbuster, like the first movie. The new villain is an interesting character, and I quite liked the creativity that went into the design of his powers and world, but for the love of god, never show me those goofy wing boots again. From the second act onwards, the movie starts to get bogged down by the Marvel machine, i.e. the movie slips out of Coogler’s hands. It’s unfortunately forced to function as a backdoor pilot for Disney + shows and used to drive the corporate machine forward, instead of focussing on the development of its own premise and character arcs. The way it rushes through the arcs of Okoye, Shuri and Namor leaves a lot to be desired. Meanwhile, cutting/writing out Riri, Martin Freeman and Julia Louis Dreyfus would improve the overall cohesion and pacing a lot. What doesn’t help either is that the action and visual effects get increasingly worse and worse as the movie goes on, to the point where we again have an ugly third act on our hands, which includes some of the most hideous looking costumes the MCU has ever put out. Moreover, the soundtrack is kinda bland this time around. It’s not like Kendrick et al. were putting out their best material for the first film, but the music here is just so vanilla and forgettable. Finally, I’m not enitrely sure what the script is trying to communicate on a deeper level, besides being a general statement in favour of diplomacy. If it’s meant to be just that, I don’t think this is anywhere as bold as the first movie. Not that it needs that in order to be good, but it’s another layer stripped away from what made the first movie special. What saves the film ultimately is a lot of its craft: the directing, worldbuilding, acting, score, cinematography, costume and set design (underwater world looked great, much better than Aquaman IMO) are all very well handled and stand out in the blockbuster field. It has those strong foundations in place that make it hard to produce a flat out bad Black Panther film, but man does this movie also show that Marvel is its own worst enemy at this point.

5.5/10
.

This was such an "aca-disappointment"!
If you came back for the laughs, the sassy characters, the anti-stereotypes and the music, be prepared to be completely disappointed.
The plot is a mess: you'd think it will actually have anything to do with Pitch Perfect 1 and 2, but it doesn't. Sure, it could be because the Bellas are now graduated working women going near their 30s, but this isn't the reason. The reason is that this movie has very little to do with singing in general, songs (which are now full covers and not cleverly mixed songs) being just a sad garnishment for a plot that doesn't know where the focus should be. Oh, you think the main thing about the movie is a-capella vs instruments? Nope, it isn't. Oh, wait, could it be that this movie is about the Bellas moving on from their a-capella group? Well, it could have been, if only the entire plot wasn't taken over by Fat Amy's evil dad!
Pitch Perfect 3 is full of moments that show the movie is clearly set in an alternate reality where everyone hates a-capella groups (or at least the Bellas), as they are considered worse than a full-instruments band by default. Also what is the point of introducing like three bands that should compete against each other for DJ Khaled's attention (he is considered a good musician in this alt. universe, I know right?!) if you are not gonna show them actually COMPETING?
I'm not trying to say that the whole Fat Amy revealing herself to be the tough daughter of an evil mastermind wasn't funny! It was, and so was that sort of Taken parody fight between Fat Amy and his dad's goons on the yacht, but it felt too much like I was being sidetracked by the main focus (or at least what have should have been) of the movie: the competition!
Oh, and soooo many wtf moments and weird dialogues...
A franchise ruined forever and totally not worth watching!

Can somebody go and check on Jared Leto?
His performance in this is so fucking funny to me, I’d be surprised if this isn’t a shoe-in for a Razzie nomination.
Every artistic choice this guy makes has to be the most overblown and ridiculous thing ever, whether that’s in his acting or his music.
I wonder if he’s still capable of delivering a good performance when he doesn’t get to hide behind make-up and eccentricities.

Not to say that the other actors are faring much better, pretty much everybody sounds like they’re doing a parody of an Italian accent, it sounds ridiculous.
Some sound like they’re trying to imitate Mario, it’s that classic “ah, mamma mia, pizzeria” shtick that everyone does when they make fun of Italians.
The only problem is: this isn’t a parody film, and the only actor that seems to get that to some extent is Adam Driver.
You’d assume that most of these conversations were in Italian in real life, so nobody would care if you’d ditch these accents in an English language film, because it isn’t going to be completely realistic anyway.
I just don’t get creative choices like this, especially from a legend like Ridley Scott, who seemed to understand this idea in his last film, which came out only 2 months ago.
As for the film itself, I’d advise anyone to simply pretend that this is meant to be a campy comedy, because it’s not that good as an Oscar drama.

Just watch Succession if this seems intriguing to you.

7.4/10. Batman Returns is a firm step up from the Batman film that precedes it, but it’s also a firm step away from the character’s source material and toward Burton’s ethos and aesthetic. Batman’s no killing code has been scrapped; his enemies’ backstories and personalities have been changed, and major foils are invented for the film out of whole cloth. But at the same time, Burton creates his own imaginative world from these comic book inputs, one that fits with his penchant for collections of oddballs, gothic imagery, and protagonist and antagonists who are equally fractured in their own ways. It produces an enjoyable and original film, albeit one that is more Burton than Batman, and which can’t sustain its unique energy through the third act.

The film’s greatest success is the relationship it portrays between Batman and Catwoman. True to Burton’s style, both Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle carry their own particular damage, and that makes them attracted to each other, in-costume and out. Returns not only has the decency to take the time to write off Vicki Vale from the last film, but does so in a way that dovetails nicely into why Catwoman makes more sense for Batman as a love interest. Bruce describes the problem with his past relationship as stemming from there being “two truths” to him, with those being hard to reconcile. But though Bruce doesn’t know it, Selina is uniquely positioned to understand that, to be able to reconcile the idea of who he is in the boardroom and on the rooftops of Gotham.

So when the two of them make reciprocal excuses to Alfred for why they have to cut their date short, while attempting to smooth things over out of fear of losing someone electrifying, the point is clear -- these two people are insane, each racing off to confront in The Penguin’s maelstrom of terror, but it’s the same type of insanity, one that makes them enemies in one world and inexorably attracted to one another in the other. The film uses the dramatic irony of the audience knowing Bruce and Selina’s alter egos, while the characters do not, to blur those lines nicely.

The peak of this is the charged moment when Bruce and Selina are dancing together at the masquerade ball, and as is appropriate for such a gathering, the masks start to slip. A line of repeated dialogue changes their sharp-edged flirtation to a revelation of who each of them becomes when the sun goes down. The push-and-pull of that, whether Bruce Wayne can have a real life, a real love, apart from his Dark Knight mission, and whether anyone who would love or understand him would be healthy, or whether it would just further fuel his own issues, is a venerable area to explore with the character. For all that Burton departs from the source, his realization of that idea here gives Returns a complexity and a tragedy that warrants inclusion in the pantheon of examinations of The Bat.

Batman Returns is also, somewhat oddly for its genre, a very sexual film. The obvious fulcrum for that quality is Catwoman herself, who slinks around in a skintight outfit, trades innuendos with Batman, and isn’t shy about getting physical in her own feline way. Though Selina Kyle starts out timid and unlucky in love, her trauma and cat-transformation turns her into a confident, powerful, sexual being. It’s hard to tell how much of Catwoman’s persona works as liberation and how much of it is mere titillation, but it’s a distinctive ingredient in the film.

But she’s not alone. Danny Devito’s Penguin is every bit the antithesis to Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman in terms of conventional standards of attractiveness, and yet he too is (at least an attempted) sexual being here. Oswald Cobblepot is a letch, groping supporters, lusting after Catwoman, and turning bitter when his advances are rejected. There’s an undercurrent of sexual desire, even in the comparatively repressed Batman, that’s firmly present throughout.

Even when he’s not making offhand comments about female staffers, Devito’s penguin vamps it up with reckless abandon. Taking a page out of Nicholson’s book from the prior installment of the franchise, Devito goes full ham as the menacing former circus freak, abandoned to the sewers by his parents. There’s a mild tragedy to Penguin, a child of privilege left to neglect by the people who should have cared for him. Despite the loving farewell he receives, there’s little humanity in this version of The Penguin, a character who is instead filled with snarling threats and duplicitous come ons. Occasionally, it’s too much, but for the most part, the performance fits with the outsized world Burton has full control over in this sequel relative to its predecessor.

Penguin is just one of the four main characters of the film who are emblematic of the theme of duality that runs throughout the film. For him, that comes to the fore in his mayoral campaign. The political commentary of Batman Returns is mild and shallow--only stooping so far as to note that politicians may not always be on the up-and-up and that the public can be swayed by propaganda--but it’s in keeping with the motif of the idea that people are different in public than in private.

Penguin is a magnanimous media darling in the papers, but is exposed for being the brutish wretch he truly is, full of resentments and anger at a city he feels is his birthright denied. Max Shreck (Christopher Walken, in his natural habitat) is a generous Gotham magnate when in the public eye, but behind closed doors, he conspires with Penguin and attempts to strongarm the political machine to favor his business interest, even resorting to casual murder when necessary. And both Batman and Catwoman lead double lives, destined to struggle to serve each of them and have some semblance of normalcy in the balance.

All that thematic intrigue, however, falls apart in the third act when Burton, having realized he’s thrown so much into the air, can’t quite figure out how to make everything land properly. Instead, he offers a bizarre climax with rocket-strapped penguins, a thematically appropriate but odd Moses-inspired revenge scheme, all four major characters converging and disappearing at convenient moments, with deaths, fake outs, and explosions that feel straight off the standard Hollywood assembly line. The narrative choices are strange at best, and incoherent at worst, and the whole thing is an unsatisfying capper to a film that otherwise manages to hold the audience’s attention throughout.

It all feels very Burton-y though. The combination of a yuletide setting and a gothic aesthetic would be further realized by Burton and Returns composer Danny Elfman in The Nightmare Before Christmas. The fractured oddities, looking for acceptance or peace in a world that doesn’t quite know what to make of them, is a recurring motif in his work. And even the film’s arch sense of humor, though sometimes cheesy, feels true to his other films. Batman Returns is more of Burton grafting the Batman mythos onto his own sensibilities than the other way around, a choice that both helps and hurts the film, but which makes it unique among superhero movies, offering an off-kilter holiday classic for the mildly deranged child in all of us.

5.7/10. Someday, possibly in the near future, we’re going to get a gritty, documentary-style Batman film about a regular guy who dresses up like a bat and gets into ugly fist fights with criminals. And when that happens, we’ll turn around and laugh at how cheesy and unrealistic the Christopher Nolan Batman films seem now. Today’s cultural sensation is tomorrow’s hokey relic. So it goes.

But until that happens, it behooves us to look at Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film, which comes off pretty corny and even rudimentary relative to the Dark Knight Trilogy, with some perspective. After the semi-grounded approach to the character in recent years, it seems odd that Burton’s film was praised for its serious approach to the source material. But contemporary critics were comparing it to William Dozer’s Batman ‘66 the overtly comedic, Adam West incarnation of the caped crusader. So while much of what Burton does in Batman feels broader and even goofier than the bat-stories people think of today, it’s important to keep it in the context of the wide spectrum of portrayals of the character and his world, whether on the page or the screen, that have taken place over the last eighty years.

Even with that thought in mind when approaching the film, it’s hard to reconcile it with the gut response to a film made almost three decades ago under very different standards and expectations for superhero films and blockbusters in general.

Some of what dates the film is easily forgivable. The effects are not up to today’s standards – CGI or no – with models or miniatures standing out fairly clearly, and even details as minor as Batman’s costume contribute to the “just playing dress up” vibe. Between the two-piece cowl, or the curtain drapery bit the Dark Knight does with his cape in an attempt to create an intimidating silhouette for the criminals he’s attacking, the entire enterprise feels chintzier than the polished (even overly polished) visuals of today.

And yet, that contributes to the feel of the film. If there’s one thing about the film that feels both entirely appropriate to the source material and yet also makes it harder for a modern day viewer to connect with the film, it’s the overall atmosphere of Batman. Burton embraces the cartoony, four-color roots of the genre in the visuals and overall tenor of the film, even when it includes more intense elements like gangland hits and dead parents.

Part of that comes from the film’s setting, which takes place in an interesting amalgam of the 1940s and the then-contemporary Reagan era. Certain elements of the film – like the cops and robbers motif and the production design as a whole place Batman in an old version of New York City that seemed to only exist on the silver screen in the first place. But things like Vicky Vale’s glasses or the breaks in the action for the Joker and his goons to dance to Prince songs, or even the particular energy of the Alexander Knox character, root the picture squarely in the late-eighties. It’s a blend that serves to make the film very specific, timeless, and dated all at once.

The set design contributes to that sense as well. It feels like Burton literally shot a movie with oversized play sets. Everything in Batman feels larger than life. The world of Gotham is a fantasy land, a theme park, that captures the unreality of Batman’s comic roots while also putting it at a remove from the audience. In effect, these choices make Burton’s Batman feels truest to those roots among the various Batman-related films, even as he departs from standard continuity and characterization. Even though Keaton’s Batman doesn’t feel pulled from the pages of Detective Comics, there’s a real sense of Burton taking the toys out of the toy box, moving them around his elegantly constructed play set, with all the bombast and silliness that goes with it.

The problem, then, is that little of it has any weight. Not every superhero movie needs to be a mediation on hope or morality or vigilantism, but Burton’s Batman comes out feeling like empty calories, with really only The Bat himself the only character who offers any sort of inner life. There’s fun to be had here – giant balloons and cartoony gadgets. But it doesn’t quite capture the pure sense of joy or investment that can come up in the lighter Marvel films of recent vintage. Burton’s Batman, instead, feels appropriately enough like a Saturday morning cartoon come to life, with the same commitment to whiz-bang action but also lack of depth.

The irony is that the actual Saturday morning cartoon inspired by Burton’s work on the screen, Batman: The Animated Series distills the character and his world down to a much more coherent and compelling version of the same ideas present here. It’s rare that the characters in Burton’s Batman feel like real people rather than four-color abstractions and broadly-sketched archetypes.

The peak of this is Jack Nicholson’s Joker. There are hints here and there at a unique conception of the Clown Prince of Crime. The most promising of them is the idea of Joker as a conceptual artist whose medium is homicide. It’s appropriately out there for the character, and accounts for the theatrical flair in his capers. But Burton’s Joker has little true motivation in the film beyond some quickly completed revenge. There’s reason to give Burton the benefit of the doubt, and take his Joker as the result of when someone with little empathy or control to begin with goes insane – unpredictable, almost random cruelty – but the bumpers of the film’s exaggerated atmosphere keep that idea from landing with any force.

That leaves Batman with a semi-incoherent antagonist, with a rushed origin story, and only Jack Nicholson’s charisma to save things. Nicholson doesn’t just chew the scenery here; he gnaws on it like a dog with a bone. That leads to some enjoyable line reads (“where does he get those wonderful toys” is still a nicely arch bit from Nicholson) and some amusing dances from the three-time Oscar winner, but mostly leads to the character feeling as though it lacks an anchor or a purpose beyond dutifully moving the conflict along and giving Nicholson the space to do a handful of off-the-wall, unconnected comic sketches. Nicholson’s Joker is over the top, as he should be, but also rudderless and showy, undercutting any menace or threat he’s supposed to pose.

That extends to the film’s biggest break with the source material – making the Joker, as a young Jack Napier, the one who killed Bruce Wayne’s parents. It creates a certain poetry and connects the hero and the villain in the way that so many stories, superhero or otherwise, like to. (See also: the first season of Netflix’s Luke Cage show.) But it doesn’t amount to much, beyond turning Batman from a crusader for justice into a bog-standard seeker of revenge.

It’s a shame because Keaton’s Batman, while hamstrung by some of the movie’s shortcomings, makes for an intriguing version of the character. He doesn’t brood exactly, but he seems quietly tortured nonetheless. It’s a choice keeps Keaton’s Batman from the taciturn glumness that overly dark modern adaptations have taken too far, but still portrays him as a man who doesn’t quite feels comfortable with who or what he is, shutting people out and working through his problems by skulking through the night and protecting other little boys whose parents wander into the wrong alley. Beyond the “wanna get nuts” interlude, it’s a nicely unshowy take on the character that succeeds in ways even the Nolan films struggled with at times.

It also gives the film its only real bit of emotional weight, especially Bruce/Batman’s relationship with Vicky Vale. Kim Basinger’s Vale is a thin, if noble for the time to put a female lead with some oomph into the narrative. She shows some modicum of cleverness and resourcefulness during the film, but still devolves into standard damsel-in-distress tropes that make her feel more like a prop than a vital part of the story. Still, the film never feels more human and real than in the moments when Bruce and Vicky are flirting, or worrying about one another, or shutting each other out. The film goes back and forth, but in their scenes set in and around Wayne Manor in particular, there’s a chemistry there that buoys the film, and gives another layer to Keaton’s performance as his Batman is only willing to let someone so far into his life.

There are other smaller elements that make the film enjoyable. Danny Elfman’s score is, to borrow the title of the film’s aborted sequel, thrillingly triumphant, with an operatic bombast that perfectly matches the tone of the film. On the other side of the coin, Michael Gough brings warmth and kindness to his portrayal of Bruce’s butler and confidant, Alfred Pennyworth, that helps give the movie what little emotional grounding it has. In between is the film’s palette, which is garish and at times even lurid appropriate to the newsprint origins, balancing the darkness of the setting with an exaggerated color scheme.

Still, Burton’s Batman can’t help but feel like a half-measure to the modern eye. Halfway between the tongue-in-cheek cheekiness of Dozier’s Batman ‘66 and the pot-boiling grit of Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, Burton’s Batman can’t quite manage the balance of weight and whimsy that the animated series he inadvertently spawned nearly perfected. Instead, the film is a muddle of Batman’s sensibilities and Burton’s, presenting yet another one of Burton’s troubled loners, amid the painted cardboard world and cartoony figures, that leave the sense of a fingers-crossed adventure where everyone’s just playacting.

Batman is not quite a lark, not quite a thrill, and not quite an achievement. It’s a curiosity, an evolutionary step for the caped crusader on the silver screen, having not fully shed its previous form, and not yet worked out what the character might be. The film is a toy box come to life, with all the good and all the bad that the description conjures.

[7.8/10] “Previously On” is the sort of episode that answers the questions fans have been asking from the beginning. Who caused the hex? (Wanda) What made her do it? (Cumulative trauma) Who’s controlling it? (Sort of Wanda, sort of not.) What’s the deal with Pietro? (Total fake). What about Vision? (Wanda recreated him.) What’s Agnes’s angle here? (A witch trying to attain more power a probably drain Wanda the same way she drained the rest of her coven.)

For a lesser show, these could be mechanical answers to mechanical questions. Instead, this episode answers those technical points while also getting at the why of all this. It confirms, once and for all, that WandaVision is a story about the slow accumulation of trauma, and the ways the shiny sitcom worlds on the television screens are an escape from it.

Agnes (or Agatha, depending on your preference), plays Ghost of Xmas Past with Wanda, forcing Wanda to guide her through major events of her history in an effort to uncover how she became this powerful. Rather than centering on incantations or magical artifacts (give or take an Infinity Stone), it hinges on the moments of both comfort and loss in Wanda’s life.

It’s a strong conceit, giving Elizabeth Olsen plenty of notes to play across the years and showing how Wanda has lost so much of the year. We start with a scene of serene domestic bliss, or what passes for it in a war-torn Eastern Bloc country, with Wanda and Pietro as children with their parents. Suddenly a bomb disrupts the peace of “TV night”, destroying the young kids’ lives amid a moment of happiness and depicting events described in Age of Ultron. \

That sets a pattern for these things, where each moment involves how Wanda copes with such losses. We see her becoming a freedom fighter (or terrorist, depending on your vantage point), out of an attempt to avenge her parents in a way. It leads her to connect with the mind stone (something that, alongside a shadowy figure, will no doubt be explored in more depth later). The experience heightened her powers, but was also a source of further trauma, of being experimented on and treated as disposable.

(Just my crazy theory: [spoiler]I predict that the shadowy figure Wanda saw in the Mind Stone will be Wanda herself, from the future, creating a stable time loop and deciding to set these events into motion, even knowing the hardships of where they lead, because it’s a way to let love persevere.[/spoilers].)

But then we get the best scene in the whole episode, where we jump to Wanda still grieving her brother’s loss, another unfathomable trauma, only to get some unexpected comfort from Vision. The writing and acting here is magnificent. The imagery of Wanda talking about grief as a series of waves, continually hitting her every time she tries to stand, is haunting and effective. But Vision’s retort, of not knowing what loss is given his origins, but appreciating the notion that it is love persevering, is just as beautiful a counterpoint. You can see the way the two of them are connected not just through the mind stone, but through their unique experiences of grappling with the human condition from opposite sides, of learning how to move forward together. The chemistry, easy rapport, and connection between them in those moments is off the charts.

It’s a minor miracle. Having lost everyone close to her, Wanda forges a connection with someone else, someone who helps fill that space. Only then, he’s taken from her too. The final flashback we see is Wanda barging into Sword and seeing Vision being torn apart. We see the man she expected to be waiting for her when she was un-blipped lying in pieces before her. She reaches down and can no longer feel her, the last thread of that connection severed.

It’s enough to send anyone sprialing. We witness the mechanics of what happens next -- a grief-stricken Wanda coming to Westview, uncovering what was meant to be the place where the rest of their lives together began, the ghost of a new chapter of domestic bliss that she was once again robbed of by chaotic forces.

So she snaps. She explodes in her grief, for her parents, for her brother, and for her love, each ripped away from her in the times she most needed comfort, most thought she could be safe and happy like those people on the television screens.

That’s the most piercing thread of “Previously On.” At each stage, Wanda watches these sitcoms as a form of relief, of escape, to have a glimpse of the life denied her by circumstance and tragedy. She’s watching The Dick Van Dyke Show and seeing a happy couple when her parents are killed. She’s watching The Brady Bunch and a couple of friendly but needling siblings when she and her brother are treated like lab rats. She sees the comical violence of Malcolm in the Middle where the father figure can endure large scale mishaps but come out unscathed because “it’s not that kind of show.”

The import is clear. The allure of these stories, this pristine or even hardscrabble sitcom worlds, is that even when the edges are rougher, tragedies rarely happen. Happy families get to persist, to flourish. They get to happen at all. It’s a world where the worst losses of the world are kept outside of the frame, made digestible and easily resolved, one half hour at a time. It is, a world where she can have the life that she dreamed of as a little girl, the life she and Vision imagined for themselves, back.

Who wouldn’t want to bury themselves in that world at a time when the universe has taken pound of flesh after pound of flesh from your body? Look, we’re talking about a famed Scarlet Witch using her “chaos magic” to rewrite reality for a small town in New Jersey. None of this is down-to-earth exactly. And yet there’s something that feels so relatable, even natural, to Wanda choosing (or instinctively reacting) to conjure the sort of place that’s bereft of the traumas she’s suffered again and again and again.

We know the ruddy details now: that Agnes wants power, that Hayward wants a Vision of his own, that Wanda is firmly the source of the Hex. But more importantly, we understand why it came to this. “Previously On” gives us all those stark moments of love and joy and happiness that Wanda was robbed of, and the comforting glow of a place where no such heart-wrenching thefts can occur. Whatever season-ending fireworks happen next week, no one can blame poor Wanda for retreating into her static-filled dream world, when so much of her life has been this crystal clear nightmare.

[7.5/10] I continue to be in awe of the way WandaVision marries difficult emotional truths with the trappings of the televised form. This week, we’ve made it to the late 2000s/early 2010s mockumentary stage, with a style borrowed from shows like The Office and Modern Family. As always, the show does it well, with the talking head segments and characters looking at the camera (or “Jimming”, to borrow a term from Community) that capture the humor of that style of comedy.

The thing that grabbed me about this one, though, is that it uses that form to lean into Wanda’s depression, her sense of meaningless to life after witnessing and suffering so much trauma, her lurking fear that she’s endured so much pain because she deserves it. So often, the show has used its sitcom homages for subtle horror, when there’s something odd at the edge of the laugh track or TGIF rhythms that make us uneasy about what terrible thing might be lurking beyond the polished exterior.

But this week, the jarring part is that we’re still doing the cheery sitcom sheen but instead pairing it more directly with Wanda’s abject despondency. She has trouble getting out of bed. She’s incapable of doing anything. She can’t take care of her kids. Our title character (or one of them, at least), has basically given up.

That’s low-key dispiriting. There’s a realism to all of this. I’m sorry to say I know what it’s like to be with a caretaker who’s suffering from this kind of depression, and once again, WandaVision is unnervingly real in its depiction of it here. The fake ad this week (a pitch-perfect spoof of pill commercials) hints at what Wanda’s going through, weighed down not only by the losses she’s experienced so far, but by the sense that the perfect world she’s constructed is now crumbling too, especially with Vision seeming to have left her.

“Breaking the Fourth Wall” conveys that nicely (and in a visually sharp fashion) as objects within the Maximoff household start fritzing between different eras. It’s a nice way to communicate that Wanda is being overtaxed and overstretched, to where without the object of her affections and the person she ostensibly did all of this for, she can’t hold the focus or will to maintain it. She doesn’t know why, but she seems to ignore it in favor of her depressed stupor, hinting that it’s an emotional issue, rather than a magical one.

There’s other big plot happenings to be enjoyed though! For one, we pair up Vision and Darcy, the latter of whom has been officially sucked into the Hex. I honestly don’t love the pairing, as their comic energy isn’t brilliant. But I suppose it’s necessary, to bring this Vision up to speed on what’s happening both inside and outside this bubble. There’s some good comedy in the impediments that Wanda sets out for Vision to prevent him from making his way back home, and as much as they’re used for comedy, there’s something quietly heartbreaking about Vision’s confessionals, where he’s unusually emotionally raw about what he knows and what he suspects about the things his wife has done and his strange state of identity. Him getting fed up with the construct and just flying toward Wanda is a big move, both in terms of plot and his character.

Arguably just as big is Monica Rambeau not only making it inside the Hex, but maintaining her sense of self. It turns out that her aerospace engineering pal is just a friend of her mom’s who’s willing to deliver a favor, which is admittedly a bit of a letdown. But the purpose is to show the strength of the Hex and, by extension, the strength of Monica when she discovers her powers. The hardcore aerospace tech can’t penetrate the bubble (and even gets turned into a wood-paneled minivan in the process), but Monica wills her way through.

I’ll be honest. I had trouble hearing the echoing voices that presumably spoke important sentiments from Monica’s life as she burst through the barrier. Given her comments later, I took it to be a commentary on trauma, that Monica too has lost people and suffered, but chooses to keep going and finds strength in that, literally and figuratively. The strange body scans were a harbinger -- she’s got abilities of her own, and she wants to use them to help Wanda, to reason with her, as someone who’s experienced similar losses.

The confrontation goes about as well as you’d think, with Wanda trying to blast her away again, but Monica being tough but firm with her target. She’s running out of time though, as Director Hayward not only wanted to use Vision as a weapon, but is planning some sort of tactical strike. I gotta say, that’s my least favorite part of this one. We’ve done the “Government agency guy has a villainous, weapons-focused motivation” time and time again in the MCU. Unless there’s some unseen wrinkle here, it’s just not an interesting twist anymore.

What is, on the other hand, is the reveal that Agnes is behind it all! That may not be a shocking revelation, but it’s still a cool one. I’ll admit, I both thought Agnes was the likely culprit going back several episodes, but also bought into last week’s headfake where she pretended to be under Wanda’s influence. WandaVision unveiling her as Agatha Harkness, another “magical gal” in town, with ominous plans still totally work.

I have to say, I love the “Agatha All Along” montage and the fact that she gets her own theme here. Kathryn Hahn is a total pro, and the way she channels the cheesily cackling and winking baddie vibe on the one hand, while conveying some actual menace on the other, is really impressive. The little outro is very funny at the same time it fills in tons of gaps, and the villainous laughter coda that she killed their little dog too is the icing on the cake.

Beneath that heightened, audience-nudging reveal is some real terror though. The prospect of what happened to Billy and Tommy concerns me, especially when Wanda finds an expansive, gothic basement containing a box like the one that she and Pietro were kept in back in the day. One of the twins, the one seemingly with psychic powers, likes her because she’s quiet inside, something far scarier than it should be. She clearly has plans for them, and children’s lives in danger chills the blood of any adult.

As it reaches its closing stretch, WandaVision puts its cards on the table, telling us who the villains on the inside and outside are, reaching the present (more or less) with its homages, and giving us four superpowered beings within the Hex prepared to do battle to save/protect/convince Wanda of what has to happen left. It’s a hell of a setup, emotionally and story-wise, and I’m excited to see how the show finishes it.

Possibly a contrarian opinion, but I'm starting to get a little worn down by a show that so heavily panders to the super fans in hopes their gushing will trickle down to the masses. You're supposed to be telling me the story, not showing glimpses of things and then hoping I'll read wiki pages and fandom entries just to know what the hell is going on.
Case in point, we've seen Monica as an operative for SWORD, but she walks through the Hex and now has glowing eyes and can stand toe to toe with Wanda. So now you expect me to read wiki entries on whoever the fuck "Spectrum" is just to understand what the hell just happened? Or are we all supposed to have a resident Marvel super fan who can just rattle off who these people are you're introducing at the speed of light?
Agatha is also another prime example. After this weeks episode, it feels like the intended reaction from the audience is "OMG THEY ARE DOING AGATHA HARKNESS?! OMG OMG OMG I CAN'T BELIEVE THEY'RE DOING AGATHA!!". I simply do not know who Agatha is or what her connection is, but all the comments online would have you believe this is the second coming of Christ.
A fly on the wall in one scene is apparantly a confirmation of either Mephisto or Nightmare. Who? What? Oh right, more wikis and fandom pages.

[9.0/10] There’s so much to talk about in this one. X-Men’s Quicksilver as Avengers Quicksilver! Bulletproof hotpants! 1980s TV spoofs! Scarlet Witch’s stand-off with Sword!

But here’s the thing that stands out to me, the thing that grabbed me the most while watching this “Very Special Episode” -- Vision confronting the woman he loves over what’s happening. That moment has extra oomph because of the effects. There’s something eerie about the two of them arguing over the end credits until they stop. There’s something scary about the two of them rising into the air at the same time they raise their voices to one another.

What stands out about it, though, is the emotional rawness in the moment. Vision isn’t just upset; he’s worried that he can no longer trust his wife, that she’s done something terrible to him, to everyone, and doing everything in her power to keep it from him. Wanda is trying to hold it together, feeling just as vulnerable and admitting she’s not even sure how this started. They are both just so messed up by what’s happening, so riven by it, but in ways that drive them apart over whether to tear this all down or do everything they can to continue propping it up.

The tenor of the scene is familiar to anyone who’s spoken with a loved one who’s unwell, who is not themselves, whether through grief or mental illness or some other trauma that jeopardizes their ability to process the world as it is. There’s an honesty to that scene, one that is frankly startling, and it’s the kind of place I never really expected an MCU project to go. It’s draped in reality-distorting fiction and the trappings of family sitcoms, but somehow that just makes it all the more disturbing and poignant when the truth of those moments bursts through those bracing layers of abstraction.

That’s bolstered by the second most stunning revelation of “On a Very Special Episode” -- that Wanda stole Vision’s corpse from Sword. More to the point, that he left a living will and wished never to be revived, not wanting to be anyone’s weapon. It’s plain that Wanda, either by herself or with the help of someone else, revivified him, and that he’s starting to reckon with the margins of what happened to him, if not the full picture.

He’s starting to see through the illusions and deceptions that Westview is made of. Again, the show does so well making the moments where it breaks the sitcom rhythms unnerving. Agnes’s “should I take it from the top” bit is eerie, and for once, Vision has a chance to realize it before Wanda resets things. Instead, she tries to play it off, tries to distract him with puppies and doorbells ringing and other head-fakes that Vision’s nevertheless noticing.

It comes through in the odd behavior of his coworkers, who respond to a Sword email by reading and laughing in unison. Vision briefly frees Norm, who is understandably frantic and undone and, most importantly, in pain over what’s being done to him. The secret truth of WandaVision is that it’s not a comedy show or sitcom homage or a superhero series. It’s a horror show, and Vision’s starting to realize that. He’s realizing that everything is wrong here, starting with him, what he can and can’t remember, and the mother of his children.

Meanwhile, there’s some more traditional but still cool developments on the outside. Monica Rambeau, Jimmy Woo, and Darcy Lewis are trying to save Wanda, trying to show her compassion despite what’s happening, while Sword Director Hayward thinks she’s just a terrorist who needs to be taken out. Meanwhile, our trio of familiar characters are finding solutions to the problem, realizing that 1980s tech can penetrate the Hex without being transformed by Scarlet Witch’s powers.

Of course, it doesn’t go unnoticed by Wanda, and she storms out of the Hex to threaten Heyward and everyone else when, unbeknownst to Monica, he tries to use their drone to eliminate her. It’s a scary moment, one only slightly cut by Elizabeth Olsen reverting to her dodgy Eastern European accent. We see definitively that Wanda has at least some control and awareness of her surroundings and what’s happening, enough to want to protect it from interlopers and those intruding on her surroundings.

It’s become increasingly clear why she’s so protective of her perfect bubble of happiness and what she is running from -- grief. The show channels that idea through 1980s sitcom pastiches in an amusing fashion, with Agnes as the friendly, albeit intrusive neighbor, kids growing up too fast, and dogs dying so that parents can give an important lesson about making peace with certain facts of life.

At the root of it, though, is a deep sense of loss and the artifacts of reckoning with death, something difficult whether you’re a child or an adult. Wanda says to her boys, and to herself, that she cannot reverse death, that they cannot turn away from it, because some things aren’t meant to be elided and some lines shouldn’t be crossed.

We confirm that she has brought the corpse of the man she loves back to life, presumably because she couldn’t deal with his absence and the tragedy of what happened to him. The commercial break this episode name-checks Lagos, the Nigerian city from Civil War where Scarlet Witch accidentally killed dozens of civilians when trying to redirect a blast, more mess than any paper towel could clean up. And she reflects, at her sons’ urging, on the loss of her own twin, Pietro, the only lifeline she had when she lost her parents at the same tender age Billy and Tommy are now.

So she does what she’s already done -- she brings him back, after a fashion. It’s an inspired bit of stunt-casting to bring in Evan Peters to quasi-reprise his role as Quicksilver. But beyond the jolt of the misdirect and reveal is a simple truth, that this whole thing is wrong. It is a coping mechanism, one meant to shield Wanda from yet another horrid demise marring her personal history.

So she, or some other force working with and through her, has constructed this place to evade that destabilizing realization. Vision is breaking out of it, shaking off the cobwebs of his violative rebirth and seeing through the comforting lies that Wanda is straining so hard to hold onto. It is difficult, hollowing, wounding to watch someone you care for undone by grief and trauma, dragging the world down with them. So much of what WandaVision does is clever or exciting or amusing. But what it does here is disquieting beyond words, and deeply, painfully true.

"Will they kill me, do you think?"

Don't go into 'Spencer' expecting an ordinary little biopic about Princess Diana. Nope, this is a straight up psychological art house horror thriller. 'Spencer' brilliantly captures the feeling of dread in an isolated foreign space surround by strangers. The royal family themselves are freaking creepy, always watching, always judging.

I must be honest, I wasn't a big fan of Kristen Stewart's recent work, as it never wowed me, and I wasn't convinced that she's improved since Twilight. But man, she's fantastic in this movie and it's one of her best performances to date. Stewart manages to portray Princess Diana in a new light that we haven't really seen before. In my opinion, her other movies failed to show her versatility as an actor, where I fully believe this movie did her justice. I'm just glad this movie won me over.

On the other hand, Timothy Spall is excellent in this movie, and another stand out performance. If you are aware of Spall as an actor, then this isn't surprising news, but I feel it needs repeating. I found him very eerie and overbearing. He plays a man with an eagle eye; he watches everything and everyone in the royal family at Sandringham House.

The major thing that this movie made me realise is that in Diana's life it's the people that kept her mentally and emotionally grounded. Her two sons, her assistant (Sally Hawkins, who is very good in the small scenes she has), and the chef played by Sean Harris, who is someone you would not think of being important.

Sean Harris is a very underrated actor that I wished people talked about more. Harris is known for playing sinister roles, but here I thought he was really sweet and shows a softer side. He's got an interesting sounding voice as well. Jack Farthing as Prince Charles does a great job playing a slimy over-privileged **** Stella Gonet as the Queen who I found really unsettling, especially her dagger eyes.

There's one scene at the dinner table with the other royal family that is one of the most intense things ever. It was anxiety level stress that made my heart racing. All thanks to Pablo Larraín claustrophobic and unique directing. Complimented by Johnny Greenwood's atmospheric, free flowing and tense score.

While I know that certain elements of the movie are fiction, but then again, the movie begins with a title card "based on a tragic fable" and I feel like the movie is playing into the nightmarish fair tale of an iconic figure in history. Diana's life in royalty was no fairy tale, but a Brothers Grimm tale.

Overall rating: The movie has metaphors to ghost, ghost of the past, ghost of old tradition. People who follow tradition isn't too kind to rarity. Great movie.

You know how I said the season 5 finale was kind of lame? This was better, but far from totally satisfying. I know a few decades is nothing when you have an eternity to look forward to, but it still sucks that Chloe had to be a single mother. It's not fair to her. I cried so much when Deckerstar were saying goodbye (a really messy, snotty cry). All the little callbacks like Chloe playing that simple melody on the piano were so sweet and Lauren and Tom really did a breathtaking job. But still, it didn't have to be this way. I think it would've been much better if Lucifer had chosen to commute to Hell and still be in Rory's life, and that moment had created an alternate timeline - so that Rory from the original timeline still arrived to fullfil her purpose, but everything from that point on was different. IMO that would've been much better than the time loop idea. When it comes to time travel, you can pretty much get away with any bullshit explanation anyway. Everyone else ended up in a really good place, so at least that was nice. Maze and Eve kicking ass and taking names together, Charlie sprouting wings... I liked all of that. Also they really got Tricia Helfer to come back without giving her any dialogue lmao.

I will miss this show. Even though I feel like it had run its course and there weren't any stories left to tell, I'm still a little sad to see it go. It wasn't a perfect show, but it had some great moments, especially when it rose above the case of the week stuff and focused more on the celestial side of things and the relationships between the characters. It had such an interesting, diverse and lovable bunch of characters who all changed and grew in organic ways. The humor was always top notch, but the show also had some genuine emotion and a lot of heart. All in all, I will remember Lucifer fondly.

EDIT: After giving myself some time to fully digest this season and this final episode, I realized that there is something deeply messed up about a show that has always been about free will - Lucifer choosing to stay on Earth, Amenadiel choosing humanity, Chloe choosing to love Lucifer (remember how big of a deal the "does she only have feelings for me because she's a gift from God?" debacle was?), Maze choosing to develop human emotions and form connections with people, Eve choosing her own path after literally being made for someone else - not giving its leads any choice in the end and forcing them to follow a predetermined path. Again, the alternate timeline idea was right there and it would've reaffirmed the show's message that you make your own fate.

[5.8/10] In the climax of Pirates at the Caribbean: At World’s End, a maelstrom erupts. Ships swirl around one another in the massive vortex. Indistinct combinations of pirates, British soldiers, and assorted mermen leap from one ship to another and cross swords. The combination of rain and cannonfire and whirling destruction makes it nigh-impossible to distinguish friend from foe or hold your bearings amid the supernatural skirmish.

It is an exhausting set piece: cacophonous, muddy, and endlessly busy without ever really finding a clear throughline for the action. Instead, it becomes a torrent of undifferentiated gray goop, flying across the screen with little point or purpose. That is, sadly, a microcosm of the movie itself.

At World’s End does contain good stories and good ideas. Jack Sparrow having a taste of the afterlife and wanting to avoid a repeat engagement at all costs is a good motivation. Will Turner being forced to test his loyalty to his fiancee against his loyalty to his father is a good moral dilemma. Elizabeth Swan seeking revenge for her father’s murder is a good driving impulse. Commodore Norrington trying to earn his redemption after his earlier betrayal is a good character beat. Davy Jones and Calypso as supernatural jilted lovers is a good concept. The fall of piracy and rise of commerce on the open seas is a good animating theme for the picture.

But by god, you just cannot do them all at once or, at the very least, you cannot do them all justice, even in the span of a bloated, nearly three-hour movie. Despite that overextended runtime, and all of that ground to cover, At World’s End still can’t justify its length. For a movie where there is constantly something happening, usually something that’s theoretically important, it is a remarkably boring film.

That’s largely because with so many plots and schemes and shifting alliances, the film still lacks the time or the real estate to really explore any of those ideas in depth, let alone find inventive ways to blend them with one another. Everything has to be done in shorthand. Major plot developments happen in a few quick scenes before it's onto the next thing, leaving each event feeling weightless. There’s plenty of incidents in the movie -- it hardly takes a moment to catch a breath -- but each feels more airy and threadbare than the last.

The one saving grace in the thing is Geoffrey Rush as Captain Barbosa. Liberated from the burden of having to play the villain, he’s free to chew scenery with abandon. As a comic side character an ally, Barbosa is just too much fun, leaning into the pirate speak and faux-grandiosity with aplomb and livening every scene he occupies.

Were that the same could be said for Jack Sparrow. If you thought the character was overexposed after the last movie, just wait until there’s literally a dozen of him on screen at the same time. Depp’s tic-filled performance was a breath of fresh air when the first movie came out, but here he’s a reminder that not all side dishes should be the main course. There’s something to the idea of him being extra mad after his stop in Davy Jones’s Locker, and his anxiety-ridden quest for immortality has some juice, but after nearly eight hours of movie, his act soon starts to grow tiresome.

That’s almost impressive in a movie with far too many characters for any one to really command the screen or the script. Beckett is nominally the film’s big bad and gets an implausible but artsy demise, but it doesn’t mean anything since all he’s done for two movies is spout villain clichés rather than become a full-fledged character. Calypso and Davy Jones’s romance is one of the few compelling romantic angles in these films, but it ends with minimal closure as the former essentially just disappears and the latter dies after about a half-second of crying over her precipitation. Even Will is sidelined for much of the picture, more passenger than driver in the third chapter of what was once a trilogy.

Maybe there would be more time for trifling things like character development if there weren’t so much damn plot and additional lore. While there’s something to be said for engaging in some additional worldbuilding for the age of pirates, halfway through movie #3 is a little late in the day for a historical exposition dump. Who’s secretly in league with whom, and who’s working on a hidden agenda, and who’s about to dramatically change sides leaves the narrative here even more convoluted than the one in Dead Man’s Chest, robbing the story of any force and smothering the movie’s charms in byzantine plot.

Some of this might be more tolerable if the damn thing were just more fun. But no, this is Serious Business:tm: now and must be treated as the epic it’s intended to be. Every once in a while, the irreverence and swashbuckling joie de vivre of the original peaks through (see: the mid-fight marriage), but this is largely a slog. Even the action set pieces, a highlight in Curse of the Black Pearl, are overblown and less-engaging this time around, as the combination of familiarity and overreliance on the usual CGI hodgepodge renders most of the big moments all but inert.

That absolutely extends to the film’s climactic final fight, where every major character is scrambled together in a wash of cutlasses and cannonballs. It’s nigh-impossible to follow the action from moment-to-moment, trace cause and effect, or maintain that type of energy for a half-hour of indiscriminate explosions.

But by god, At World’s End tries, not just in that overdone closing battle, but in the movie as a whole, which succumbs to the same problems on a larger scale. If it could be broken into its constituent parts and provide each with enough time and space to be developed, there’s at least three or four solid flicks that could be wrung from all Gore Verbinski try to pack in here. Instead, we get an ungainly film that loads far too much onto what was once a sleek, zippy ship, until it can do nothing else but sink.

[6.1/10] The glory of the original Pirates of the Caribbean movie is that it took itself just seriously enough, without taking itself too seriously. There was enough action and drama for there to be stakes, but also enough humor and levity to make it a fun romp of a film. It left room for more stories, but it also worked as its own thing, with scenes and motivations that built on one another.

Dead Man’s Chest throws all of that out the porthole. Suddenly, the Pirates franchise now has epic lore involving souped up versions of the antagonists from the last movie, with grave implications for every new development. The humor is reduced to the broadest of shtick and takes a backseat to tedious speechifying about destiny and the “true nature” of this or that character. And the movie is a fifteen-car-pileup of plots and callbacks and character beats, stopping not because the film’s reached any kind of natural endpoint or even intermission, but because that’s just where director Gore Verbinski and his team happened to hit the pause button.

About the only good element that survives from Curse of the Black Pearl into Dead Man’s Chest is the production design and effects. Say what you will about the movie’s contrived reasons for sending our heroes dotting across the map, but it at least finds some scenic locales to shoot them in. Likewise, Davy Jones, while showing a bit of age as an effect, is still a marvel of on-screen wizardry, able to move with weight and have distinctive expressions as he interacts with the flesh and blood characters. His ship shares the same realness and creativity of design, a waterlogged battleship that looks appropriately worn by both time and the sea.

And yet, even there, the visuals are hit or miss. While Jones himself is convincing and Bootstrap Bill has a distinctive look, the rest of the crew of the Flying Dutchmen feature unique designs but dodgy looking CGI realizations. The famed kraken is poorly composited into the live action sequences, making our heroes appear as though they’re fighting a big cartoon character rather than a threatening piece of calamari. What’s more, in places like the waterwheel fight or Jack’s own standoff with the kraken, the green screen effects are painfully obvious, breaking immersion.

All of that could be forgivable, especially for 2006, if trifling things like plot and character and motivation were better than “mildly passable.” In contrast to the thrill-heavy clarity of Curse of the Black Pearl, this sequel is convoluted and overstuffed. Nowhere is that more evident than in how many MacGuffins there are in a single two-and-a-half hour film.

There’s Davy Jones’s heart. Then there’s the chest that holds Davy Jones’s heart. Then there’s the key that opens the chest that holds Davy Jones’s heart. Then there’s the drawing of the key that opens the chest that holds Davy Jones heart. And that’s before you get to the jar of dirt that might hide Davy Jones heart, or the compass that might lead you to Davy Jones’s heart, or the letters of mark that you might be able to bargain for Davy Jones’s heart. This film has no shortage of random, mostly uninteresting objects that various characters are after in various combinations, with only clumsy throughlines for how one leads to another.

That extends to the characters’ wants and goals here. Again, in the original film, each major character had a fairly straightforward but nevertheless strong motivation. Dead Man’s Chest, by contrast, makes an utter hash of it. Beyond just the endless quest for the various MacGuffins, who’s trying to rescue whom or sell off somebody to somebody else, or get back into a random third party’s good graces becomes bewildering at some point.

Even for a bloated, two-movie narrative, there’s just too many characters with too many objectives here. Will Turner wants to save Elizabeth Swann again, except he gets sidetracked with a promise to his dad. Former Commodore Norrington is back despite not really having a place in the story, and is gunning for redemption or at least a chit he can use to regain his former stature. Two new villains, and their seconds, and Will’s dad, and Elizabeth’s dad, and the old pirate crew, and the voodoo priestess, and more familiar faces still each have to get their moment in the sun with jumbled up schemes and wishes. Even Jack, the last film’s agent of chaos, is torn between trying to hold off Davy Jones’s claim on his soul and pursuing Elizabeth himself.

Therein lies arguably the worst element of the film. Depp’s Sparrow was an entertaining side dish in the first movie, but here, after so much fanfare and adoration over his performance, he becomes not only the main course, but a romantic lead. Not only does his shtick wear much thinner when it’s the focus rather than one piece among many, but Verbinski and the writers feel compelled to inject a needless love triangle to ensnare Jack, Elizabeth, and Will, despite it adding nothing to the proceedings.

Needless addition is the unofficial theme of Dead Man’s Chest: more plots, more characters, more power plays, and more overextended (and sometimes shockingly racist) action sequences, which lack the prior film’s thrills and panache. Only the big second act set piece manages to channel the energy that drove Curse of the Black Pearl, including enough wry jokes and swashbuckling fun to keep things light yet exciting. That’s a rare moment though, and even it gives way to the film’s “too much, too quickly” pacing problems eventually.

If that weren’t enough, the film is awash in callbacks to the first film, constantly elbowing the audience in the ribs and trying to see if it remembers the franchise’s earlier, better effort. There’s a Star Wars prequel level of embarrassingly on-the-nose references to the prior movie here, and at least there, the franchise went sixteen years between releases, rather than three, before it started eating its own tail.

The real problem is that the original Pirates of the Caribbean was built to be a breezy, exciting lark of a film, not a franchise-starter. So when Disney and Verbinski try to reverse engineer their way into a grand tale with enough mythos and high drama to turn Pirates into some epic quest, the effort looks like so many boats in these movies -- creaky, haphazardly built, and full of holes. Trying to force Jack Sparrow and his cohort into that mold leaves Dead Man’s Chest feeling like just another disappointing, overblown blockbuster, losing the spark and glimmer of the movie that accidentally started this series, like so much sunken treasure.

Series Review

I'm tired.

Maybe I'm too critical, or perhaps I should give up on the MCU? The MCU fatigue is real this time, and it's getting old. No, this series isn't bad, and neither was WandaVision. But with each new MCU release, the more I'm pushed to the brink. I used to love this franchise, can you believe it? I loved all the movies, and I gave my money to the box office as reluctantly as any other MCU stan. Now, I'm tired. I'm tired of the same old stories, with their important messages, but poor storytelling.

Falcon begins by giving up the shield to the Smithsonian (museum), unknowingly handing the Captain America mantle to Walker. After Walker snaps, he reconsiders his decision. So, he talks to Isaiah Bradley (a black Super Soldier who the government rejected as Captain America), who tells him he won't make it, and becomes Captain America soon after. Was there any revelation here? What did Sam learn? He just went through a training montage, and then he was ready. What a relatable challenge that he went through that I can apply to real life! I just gotta ignore the haters, ya'll!

In some of these movies, the "character arcs" go like this: I want to do this, I face opposition, the opposition turns out to be wrong because..., I'm right, and I win. No one learns anything; all it says is that you're always right, and people who tell you otherwise are wrong. That's an empowering message, but has Marvel's writers stopped to consider that their audience might be the villains instead of the heroes; what if they're the opposition, and they're just wrong, instead of the heroes who are always right?

But this show does a lot I admire; a darker, grittier tone, better action (than some recent stuff), important themes and attempts at character arcs/development. Whew, I'm still tired, though.

As Cosmonaut Marcus writes,

"It was whatever." — Cosmonaut Marcus (https://twitter.com/CosmonautMarcus/status/1385534378239987712)

SCORE: 6/10

Watching through Buffy for the first time recently. I missed it the first go-round as i would've been too hardcore goth for such bubblegummy fare when it was first coming out. It's good timing, actually, i feel like the ensuing 2 decades have put me in a place to appreciate Joss Whedon's campy vision.

I feel like Teacher's Pet is the episode where the series starts to hit its stride. The main characters seem to be establishing their chemistry, which is excellent and worth watching for that alone. Secondarily, it's good, goofy late 90s fun. While this show could easily veer towards the obnoxious, somehow it toes the line and is charming instead. I feel like if this came out even 3 years later, it wouldn't have worked, as i imagine they'd have been tempted to use CGI instead of practical effects and the whole thing would've been rendered dated and cheap. Instead, Buffy has kind of a timeless quality, in lines with weird, goofy teen horror romps, from Eerie, Indiana to The Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina.

I also like to imagine a world where teenagers go out and watch live music almost every day. Makes me miss going to shows.

Probably should have just made it a Disney Plus series. Movies try to fit too many books into one film.
Though, you’re better off just listening to the Richard Roeper review. This movie really isn’t deserving of only 14% good reviews.
It is nice to get a Summer movie at home. Artemis Fowl isn’t as magical as a Harry Potter movie. It is a nice present to enjoy at home. When you can’t go to theaters though.
I can’t say Artemis Fowl is bad or as bad as a movie that has gotten 14% good reviews. There’s more story than a Bayforners film.
If you think about it, what classic Fantasy from the 80’s did critics actually like ? So why listen to people who hated the Labyrinth, Return to Oz, Willow, The Neverending Story....
Artemis isn’t as memorable as any movie I just mentioned. However it has some charm and better than a weaker Disney Fantasy, A Wrinkle in Time.
Performances wise. Josh Gad and
Lara McDonnell are the only ones who stand out. Well, not just because Gad borrowed Hagrid’s look. Lara McDonnell makes a charming fairy.
Ferdia Shaw is the least interesting and he is Artemis. Since I wasn’t sure if he was actually trying or not. He also doesn’t really get much to do.

[8.8/10] There’s a funny thing about these updated, transmogrified Shakespeare adaptations like 10 Things I Hate About You. If you didn’t know better, you could call the plots convoluted. There is a complicated web of relationships and deceptions, to the point that you practically need a diagram to explain it properly.

In short, Michael helps his friend Cameron woo Bianca by convincing Joey to pay Patrick to date Kat, because Bianca, per her father Mr. Stratford, cannot date until Kat does. With me? Well then, it turns out that Kat dated Joey, and after Bianca picks Cameron over Joey, Joey picks Bianca’s friend Chastity, while Michael pursues Kat’s friend Mandella, as Kat and Patrick’s tempestuous relationship takes root.

It’s a little dizzying, and yet the complex string of friends and enemies and relationships that tow the line between put-ons and genuine affection track nigh-perfectly into the high school setting. Despite the dense qualities of that big ball of string’s worth of plot threads, the complicated social structures and intersecting circles of high school make for the perfect way to realizes The Bard’s comedies in the modern day.

But 10 things is more than just a transmogrified version of The Taming of the Shrew. It also a charming tale that captures the heart and hazards of adolescence at the same time it exaggerates them for comic effect. What’s most impressive about the film is how it has its cake and eats it too on that front. There are goofy beats and subplots that only happen in teen movies, like unexpected party scenes and famous bands showing up to play contemporary (hopefully) chart-topping hits for the soundtrack.

But amid that broader material, there is a real examination of what it is to play up or down to expectation, a theme present in the work that inspired 10 Things, but which is given new life in the guise of the teenagers who are at that point in the fraught process of growing up where they’re deciding who and what they want to be, in love and in life. The gross wager that turns into real love is a hoary trope (see also: fellow 1990s borrower She’s All That) but by rooting the romance at the core of the film in two people who embrace a thorny image and find the hidden depths behind the prickers in one another, the film does justice to its source material and resonates with a target audience trying to figure out which parts of who they are malleable, which parts are non-negotiable, and which parts are fit to be broadcast to the rest of the world (or at least, the relevant social circles)>

It is also just damn charming. The film is full of quotable lines and crackerjack exchanges between characters. The cutting aside is wielded well and often, and side characters like teachers (including the great Allison Janney) and parents (Larry Miller, who nails both comedy and emotion as Mr. Stratford) provide a backdrop of colorful characters for the main story to flourish in. The writing stands out in 10 Things not just for the amusing lines which liven some otherwise familiar teen material, but for the way it allows the film to, in true Shakespeare form, shift tones into more serious material when it needs to.

The same goes for the characters. Kat shoots off the best zingers in the movie, and with her rebellious attitude and literary bent, it would be easy to turn her into a one-dimensional avatar rather than a character. Instead, the film roots her perspective and demeanor in an experience with Joey that gives form to her concerns of Bianca following in her footsteps, and gives just enough context to her mom leaving to make the crisis of conscience and turning point understandable.

By the same token, Bianca could easily be a generic popular girl, and in fairness, at certain points of the film, she is. But she too has a simple but meaningful arc of playing to expectations only to realize that she doesn’t necessarily like what that gets her, and it allows the two sisters to grow in their understanding of one another in strong scenes that deepen their relationship.

The objects of their affection receive a bit of shading as well. The reveal that Patrick, who puts on a gruff exterior and bears the reputation derived from many humorous urban legends about him, is not as wild as he seems is, perhaps, a predictable one. But he gains strength from the way that he and Kat see bits of themselves in one another, Cameron is a bit flatter, learning a trite if endearingly-put lesson about not accepting the notion that he doesn’t deserve what he wants, but there’s enough there to give ballast to the enjoyable-if-disposable teen romp elements.

Even Mr. Stratford, who is arguably the most outsized major character in the film, gets a bit of shading. While he spits out awkward-sounding nineties slang and is comically overprotective and paranoid of his daughters getting pregnant, the film balances that with a subtext to his insecurities about Kat leaving for Sarah Lawrence. There is a Daria-like quality to the film’s ability to poke fun at the parent-child relationship, but also find the sweetness and sincerity in it.

That’s what makes 10 Things more than the sum of its byzantine bets and love triangles. Some twists are convenient, some gestures a little too big to work anywhere but on the silver screen, and some bits of forgiveness come a little too easy. Still, the film keeps its plot, humor, and drama working in sync, where one scene can make you chuckle, the next will let you get to know a character a little better, and the one after will tug at your heartstrings, just a little bit.

The oh-so-nineties soundtrack immediately places in the film at a specific moment in time, but it speaks to the relatable qualities of that quest to figure out both who you are, and who’ll accept you for who you are, that feel like life and death for all seventeen-year-olds. 10 Things is a touchstone for those who grew up with it, both for the quips and clever asides that let the film crackle, and for the notion of young men and women, cutting through pretension and presentation, and finding something true beneath it, in themselves and in the people they love.

[7.6/10] In some ways, “Homer vs. Lisa and the Eighth Commandment” is one of The Simpsons’’s most dated episodes. Its main plot centers on stealing cable through adjusting the hook-up between your T.V. set and the bundle of wires that connects it to the outside world. For one thing, it rests on a schism between over-the-air television and “pay T.V.” that doesn't really exist in the same way given the multitude of entertainment options and avenues. The very idea of “getting cable” is a bit outmoded given the variety of ways people consume T.V., movies, and other entertainment. And the simple notion of a shady guy making it all happen through a few misplaced wires is downright quaint.

But in others, the episode is timeless. While the sources and methods of obtaining premium content have varied considerably since 1991, when it originally aired, we live in an age of an increasing number of cord-cutters and cord-shavers and others tired of subsisting on traditional entertainment offerings. And while rewiring one’s cable box has gone the way of fixing the tracking on your VCR, piracy, illegal streams, and bootleg DVDs are still the province of average joes galled by pricey packages and an increasing number of walled gardens.

And even more universal is the moral dilemma at the core of “Homer vs. Lisa and the Eighth Commandment.” The episode is anchored around the biblical admonition “Thou Shalt Not Steal.” And whether that means swiping a graven idol from a shop in ancient Sinai, using an illegal cable hook-up in the Springfield of the 1990s, or running a shady bitcoin scam today, the ethical conundrums of what constitutes theft, immorality, and upstanding principles in the life of the nuclear family are just as compelling and applicable.

What’s funny is that when the episode aired, America’s moral guardians were wringing their hands about The Simpsons as a bad influence, and yet, Homer’s part of this episode reads almost like a Chick tract. Homer is the instigator of the cable-stealing (recreating North by Northwest to get it), and at first, everything’s good. He’s thoroughly seduced by his drug of choice, glued to the T.V. set 24/7, and everything from being able to entertain his family to being the toast of the town for hosting the big prize fight suggests a big win for the lovable oaf.

But then things start to crumble. The normally immovable object of television’s affections grows disillusioned and disinterested even with cable television’s cavalcade of offerings. He starts to grow increasingly panicked about everyone from his boss to his bartender finding out the various ways he’s bent or broken the rules over the years. And after a well-done sequence where he imagines a fanciful, if more secular-than-divine punishment for his ill deeds, has a change of heart, and desperate to escape his guilt and paranoia, he begrudgingly becomes a pioneering cord-cutter once more.

And he does so at the behest of an earnest voice encouraging him to save his soul. One of the unique things about “Homer vs. Lisa and the Eighth Commandment” is that, in contrast to some of the other “versus” episodes in The Simpsons catalogue, there’s not really much antagonism between the two title characters in this one. It’s more that Homer is on the highway to hell, and Lisa is the Jiminy Cricket on his shoulder, calmly but firmly encouraging to be a more moral man, but in a way founded more on childlike protest than direct confrontation.

There is, as was even more potent in the show’s early seasons, some subtle social commentary in that. There’s something well-observed about the way the show presents Lisa’s position in relation to the adults in her life. She’s taught that the Ten Commandments are absolute hard and fast rules, where the punishment for violations is eternal damnation. Her parents seem to care enough about these core precepts to take her to church, but then they do things like steal cable, or sample a pair of grapes without paying for them. Sure, the latter at least may seem too minimal, but if it’s a biblical stricture, and the risk is going to hell, why wouldn’t you be extraordinarily wary of even the slightest misstep?

Lisa, then, is the conduit for the show pointing out that however much folks believe in the basic moral principles behind the Ten Commandments, people’s devotion and belief only runs so deep, otherwise we’d all be acting like Lisa. There’s an innocence and willingness to take things at face value in childhood, and as usual, The Simpsons points out how, in American society at least, the way that people bend the rules suggests they don’t always practice what they preach.

As is typical for the show in its early going, the humor derived from that idea is softer. Lisa shouting at the supermarket, Homer freaking out about office supplies he swiped from work, and Marge being excited to make her own band-aids is all pretty mild, but its rooted in wry observations about how we compartmentalize our religious tenets rather than let them interfere with our daily lives. The bulk of the straighter comedy is picked up more by a cavalcade of wide-ranging cable T.V. spoofs, and with Bart up to his traditional hellraiser tricks. But as usual, early season Simpsons is content to pull humor from the shape of whatever situation its deposited its characters in rather than setups and punchlines.

For the most part though, the show gives us morality tale. There’s a goofus and gallant routine between Homer and Lisa, the simple oaf lured by the glow of the television, contrasted with the principled young woman worried for her mortal soul. It wasn’t the first time that Lisa led her father to be his best self, and it wouldn’t be the last. But there’s still something unique about this one, where Lisa is still definitively a kid, Homer is less idiotic and more easily seduced than usual, and when the pair’s trajectories crash into one another, Lisa brings her father to the side of the angels.

The specifics of the story may be rooted in the particulars of 1990, but the ideas at the core of this one -- bent and broken morality, the situational malleability of religious beliefs for most people, and the way good influences in our lives can remind us of our better selves -- are timeless.

[7.3/10] Well, that was bold. I have to give the show that much.

Let’s start with the big mystery reveal. I suppose I have a bit of egg on my face after my last write-up when I railed about how Penn couldn’t be the real bomber. The show gives him a good bit of motive and opportunity. We see him having been harassed and disrespected by all the Spring Breakers, which gives him reason to hate them and want them gone. And his interest in true crime gives him the understanding of how these investigations proceed to be able to (a.) potentially get away with it (b.) feed the investigators what they need and (c.) understand how the explosives work, something he’s been working up to.

You can also see how the whole Murderheads thing makes him love the spotlight, idolizing killers, until the two combine and he realizes the best way to hang onto the spotlight is to become one of the murderers he so admires.

But I don’t know, at some point it just requires too much contrivance to really make complete sense to me, less from motivation and more from action. Can you really picture Patton Oswalt lugging the body of his “friend” Don or getting the neck bomb on that kid? And at the same time, for his plan to work, he had to be able to play Veronica and Keith to a degree that feels impossible, requiring them to pick him up at just the right time so he could leave his bag in their car, and lead them to Don, and all this other stuff that just seems kind of implausible.

Beyond Penn turning into a Bond villain and delivering monologues to Veronica at the end (which you can at least attribute to him watching true crime shows and aiming for their same sense of grandiosity), beyond the sort of visceral implausibility of Penn managing to stage all these crimes, it just requires too much to go right for him for everything to work out the way it did.

Granted, I think of the 7 major mysteries the show has done at this point, I think I only found one of them fully satisfying, so there’s a fair argument that this sort of thing is just the show’s M.O. and a decade and a half after the series’s debut, you’re either on board with it or you’re not. I like Veronica Mars for the great humor and dialogue, the strongly-written character relationships, and the fun and twists of the mystery along the way, regardless of whether the answers make complete sense.

But man, those character relationships take some pretty big blows here! I admire the show’s boldness in killing Logan right when he and Veronica are at peak happiness. This show was often compared to Buffy the Vampire Slayer in its early days, and that’s a very Buffy move. The ethos for this show has always been that in Neptune, where everything is rigged, even when you win, you lose. To have Veronica solve the mystery, marry the love of her life, and get a clean bill of health for her dad, only to see the bomber take one last pound of flesh, and to have the corporate and gentrifying interests take over the beach anyway, feels true to what the show is and has been.

I’ll admit, though, that I don’t really like the fake out with it seeming like Logan was going to bail on the wedding. I understand needing to have some stakes in these moments, but it just came off cheesy to me, as did the whole “last recorded voicemail” shtick. Still, as a BSG fan, it’s always a thrill to see Mary McDonnel pop up, and I appreciate that the silver lining to all of this is Veronica accepting that she needed to deal with some shit and going to therapy.

I also neglected to mention that however contrived the situation is, I really like the scene at the heretofore unmentioned Kane High School commemoration. For one thing, it’s just fun to see Veronica show up and crash another Kane event (almost literally). But there’s legitimate tension when Veronica has to watch Keith stand there and try to convince Penn to confess and defuse the bomb before they’re both blown up. Say what you will about how the show crafts its mysteries, but it knows how to pull off a suspenseful scene.

Otherwise, I like where things land for the most part. I appreciate the reveal that Maddie is the one who stole the ring (Vinnie was right!), which establishes her rough-around-the-edges bona fides that makes her fit to fill Veronica’s shoes at Mars Investigations. I like that in the end, Keith still can’t abide what Clyde did, despite how endearing their bromance is, and I like that Clyde ends up with his girlfriend and his car dealership, underscoring the anti-”evil never prospers” message of the show. And I like that maybe, just maybe, Veronica is genuinely ready to move on from Neptune, to go see what else is out there, now that the best life she was living there has been ripped away from her.

Overall, I’m not entirely satisfied with the answer to the big mystery, but otherwise I really liked this season. It definitely had the tone and sensibility of the show right. It had some good personal developments with the main characters, and brought in a slew of interesting new fresh faces. And it made some bold moves here, that challenge our hero, and live up to the show’s perspective rather than sanding it down. Good, bad, and otherwise, this season was still very much the Veronica Mars that I remembered, and that’s a good thing.

Great wrap up to a wacky season! It was bound to happen, but still, I am sad to see Blum go (yes, I'm aware I'm in the minority, though I understand the Blum hate), but I am happy that he took Maia with him (I still don't like her). Judging by her last scene, he seemed to have ruined her, anyway, so nothing's lost, there.

Between the absurdity of the ASMR testimony and the silly Brooks Brothers riot re-enactment, that has got to be the most ludicrous trial we've ever seen in The Good Fight! And I'm glad for it, this show does not spend enough time in the courtroom, unfortunately, so I treasure every moment that it does. And this one trumped them all!

I did not understand if the whole ball lightning was supposed to be a metaphor for something. Nothing burned up in the end, Reddick, Boseman & Lockhart won the trial, so... What was that all about? Same thing goes for that cliffhanger... What the flying fuck?! I'm guessing Kurt will be charged for something. Or maybe Diane. Or both! Maybe the Book Club has something to do with it, like someone suggested around here. I hope we'll get to see the reason behind that scene by early 2020.

... Until then, enjoy Donald J. Trump, everybody!