[9.5/10] They got me. They really did. I believed that Saul would do it, that he would find a way to lie, cheat, and steal out of suffering any real consequences for all the pain and losses he is responsible for. I believed that he would trade in Kim's freedom and chance to make a clean break after baring her soul in exchange for a damn pint of ice cream. I have long clocked Better Call Saul as a tragedy, about a man who could have been good, and yet, through both circumstance and choice, lists inexorably toward becoming a terrible, arguably evil person. I thought this would be the final thud of his descent, selling out the one person on this Earth who loved him to feather his own nest.
Maybe Walt was right when he said that Jimmy was "always like this." Maybe Chuck was right that there something inherently corrupt and untrustworthy in the heart of his little brother. This post-Breaking Bad epilogue has been an object lesson in the depths to which Gene Takovic will stoop in order to feed his addiction and get what he wants. There would be no greater affirmation of the completeness of his craven selfishness and cruelty than throwing Kim under the bus to save himself.
Only, in the end, that's the feint, that's the trick, that's the con, on the feds and the audience. When Saul hears that Kim took his words to heart and turned herself in, facing the punishments that come with it, he can't sit idly by and profit from his own lies and bullshit. He doesn't want to sell her out; he wants to fall on the sword in front of her, make sure she knows that he knows what he did wrong.Despite his earlier protestations that his only regret was not making more money or avoiding knee damage, he wants to confess in a court of law that he regrets the choices that led him here and the pain he caused, and most of all he regrets that they led to losing her.
In that final act of showmanship and grace, he lives up to the advice Chuck gives him in the flashback scene here, that if he doesn't like the road that his bad choices have led him, there's no shame in taking a different path. Much as Walt did, at the end of the line, Saul admits his genuine motives, he accepts responsibility for his choices after years of blame and evasion. Most of all, he takes his name back, a conscious return to being the person that Kim once knew, in form and substance. It is late, very late, when it happens, but after so much, Jimmy uses his incredible skills to accept his consequences, rather than sidestep them, and he finds the better path that Kim always believed he could walk, one that she motivates him to tread.
It is a wonderful finale to this all-time great show. I had long believed that this series was a tragedy. It had to be, given where Jimmy started and where the audience knew Saul ended. But as it was always so good at doing, Better Call Saul surprised me, with a measured bit of earned redemption for its protagonist, and moving suggestion that with someone we care for and who cares of us, even the worst of us can become someone and something better. In its final episode, the series offered one more transformation -- from a tale of tragedy, to a story of hope.
(On a personal note, I just want to say thank you to everyone who read and commented on my reviews here over the years. There is truly no show that's been as rewarding for me to write about than Better Call Saul, and so much of that owes to the community of people who offered me the time and consideration to share my thoughts, offered their kind words, and helped me look at the series in new ways with their thoughtful comments. I don't know what the future holds, but I am so grateful to have been so fortunate as to share this time and these words with you.)
EDIT: One last time, here is my usual, extended review of the finale in case anyone's interested -- https://thespool.net/reviews/better-call-saul-series-finale-recap-saul-gone/
I disagree with other comments that the pacing of this episode is slow. I didn't notice it any slower than any GOT episode. Every episode doesn't need war or intensity to be satisfying. A good show needs character building to set up further story.
This is bound to be divisive, and I can see it getting a cult following in the future.
It plays out a lot like an Edgar Wright movie, starting as one movie and slowly morphing into another.
I personally liked it a lot, I found it very inspired and creative from a story perspective.
It has a great character at the center, some really unpredictable twists, it delivers the scares and gore you want, terrific visuals (Wan’s trademark camerawork is here) and good music (there is a subtle song reference that’s actually kinda brilliant).
It’s not perfect though: the acting can sometimes be a little wonky, there’s too much unneeded exposition, and the tone can occasionally get a little campy, which doesn’t always work.
Still, you have to respect James Wan for bringing creative and fresh ideas into a genre that has continued to give us the same shit over and over again.
6/10
Why didn’t he shoot Beta in the head with the arrow instead of that girl that got turned?
The real question is why the hell did the guy charge money for snacks at the white house?
So I suppose they don't hire brazillians actors to play an actual brazillian citizen lol that accent was terrible tbh
No matter, how hard you try, there's always an idiot in the group that's giving away vital information or doing something really fucking stupid. Henry is weak.
[9.0/10[ An incredibly tense hour of television. What's so impressive is that Better Call Saul accomplished this despite us knowing that, of course, Jimmy and Gus both survive. It comes down to such fantastic performances from everyone involved. You immediately buy how shaken and terrified Jimmy and Kim are, and how frightened even the normally steady Gus is at the point of Lalo's gun. Vince Gilligan's direction is outstanding, with a Hitchcockian flair for light and shadow that sets the foreboding mood of all these set pieces. And the score does the rest, helping the audience to feel the emotion of these scenes even if we rationally know the fates of several of those at the most risk.
My only mild beef is that Gus' survival feels like a bit of a cheat. It's still not clear to me why he did the gun in the superlab, and the dialogue kind of shrugs at the idea. Even in the dark, it seems like Lalo would have done better against Fring than he did. But details like Fring seeming to make one last desperate ploy to survive, still suffering wounds despite his body armor, and admitting he was over his skiis with this whole thing in the end helps make it passable. On a moment-to-moment basis, the scenes absolutely work, which covers for a lot.
What struck me the most is that closing image -- Howard and Lalo, two very different men, sharing the same fate and the same grave. It's a sign that the barrier between Jimmy's legal life and Saul's criminal life has been firmly shattered. Both lives, both worlds, are bound up in these deaths now, with the psychic weight hanging over Jimmy and Kim for the last five episodes. This never happened, but they, and Mike, will all still have to live with it. I can't wait to see how.
EDIT: If you'd like to read my usual, longer review of the episode, you can find it here -- https://thespool.net/reviews/tv-recap-better-call-saul-season-6-episode-8/
Everyone out here complaining about the ending. I’m just really upset my dude died his hair that hideous red color
Jonathan Majors , love the dude, but that performance was godawful. He kinda reminded me of Jesse Eisenberg in Batman V Superman
Not for epileptics my god
Terribly overrated. It's self-conscious about the "rules" of slasher films, but it has nothing to say about them.
I don’t get why Rhaenyra had a kid with that loser, let alone 3
Also why does Alicent have so much power? The king needs to put her in her place
[9.0/10] The beauty of science fiction is that, in the right hands, it can tell stories that other genres can’t. Strip away the limitations of fact, unleash the powers of imagination, and you can conjures worlds and situations that the poor metes and bounds of the real world cannot sustain. But in the best hands, the absence of those limitations, the combination of fiction and abstraction, allows an author and an audience to reach truths that even the most poignant, most trenchant cut of reality cannot match.
So when Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons imagined a god, a living embodiment of quantum entanglement, they used him to explore the bitter ironies of causality. They traced the lines of cause and effect, jumbled through one man’s life, to find the knotted ends of detachment and transcendence amid omniscience turned predestination. Jon Osterman had, like others before him, come unstuck in time. And his creators, like others before then, used his temporal dilation to explicate the human condition in ways that linear storytelling would not allow.
Jeff Jensen & Damon Lindelof use it to tell a story about love and about creation, and about how both create a yearning for something that is fated to be gone. Love is what motivates Dr. Manhattan to create his paradise: a glass jar, a comforting home, and the two people who first showed him what resolute joy looks like. He constructs them to want only to spur that same joy in others, rather than hoard it for themselves, but it leaves one of the originals bereft of a creator who abandoned him, and his many copies hurt, in their firm and upright way, that their master wants to leave them. And it’s what cause him and Angela Abar to forge a life together, a joining of two into one that, unlike the “everything” Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias one spoke of, must not only end, but end tragically.
Watchmen takes advantage of Jon Osterman’s scattered, all-at-once experience of the timeline to channel those ideas. The frame story is what amounts to his and Angela’s first date -- a series of predictions and parlor tricks that warn her everything that’s to come, in sufficiently vague terms, with the knowledge that they’ll be enough to bring them together. Some things he keeps hidden. Some things he allows Angela to arrive at on her own. But either way, he does so with the knowledge of where they will lead, because he’s experienced their past and their future and their present, or rather, he’s experiencing them all right now.
Jensen & Lindelof justify the series’s biggest twist by how maddening it would be to love something like that. Why would a god abandon his life, confine himself to a mortal? Maybe he would do it, in a bizarre sort of way, as “a Zeus thing.” Maybe it’s the one sort of risk he can take to show the woman he cares for that he would sacrifice for her, that he’d give up paradise for her, that he’d live with fear again for her. The transition from Jon to Cal is a leveling, one that requires a great deal to earn ten years of love.
Watchmen likewise had a number of narrative bills that were coming due. We needed to know why Adrian Veidt was on Europa and what the hell was going on there. We needed to know why a god would wrap himself in a mortal’s bones and sinew. We needed to know what motivated Reeves to go on this crusade. And against all odds, “A God Walks Into Abar” has roundly satisfying answers.
Europa is the paradise that Ozymandias thought he wanted, the chance to be adored that he trades for the answer to Dr. Manhattan’s desire to be closer to the woman he loves, and not lose her like he did Laurie. The servants there are his effort to create life, to find a gentler world, amid the larger creation motifs and allegories the episode unleashes with regularity. Dr. Manhattan chooses to become human again to give his romance with Angela the opportunity to blossom. And over the course of ten years, Veidt’s liberation-turned-gilded cage, and the Abar’s love and life together, are each allowed to blossom in a way that fits the other puzzle pieces that Watchmen has laid down.
But not all of it fits so neatly. When it comes time to explore how Reeves became involved in all this, “A God Walks into Abar” chooses to make Dr. Manhattan a conduit, a channel between two people who barely understand one another’s existence, and inadvertently (or purposely) allows them to start something that will bring all of them to the present moment. But instead of the other events, which cloak some certain effect in the future with some mention of its cause in the present, the time-shifted exchange between Reeves and his granddaughter is sui generis. It is a stable time loop, one where it’s impossible to say who initiated the knowledge of Judd Crawford that starts all of this, if anyone did.
It is a paradox, the sort which not even Dr. Manhattan can resolve. But it’s not the one that moves him. Instead, it’s the fact that Angela tries to save him even when told, by a man that sees the future, that she cannot. It is the moment that he falls in love with her, and yet it is both the last moment they share and the thing that spurs him to seek out the first one. It is a paeon to the inscrutability of love, the incomprehensibility of creation in this sorry universe, where misbehaving quantum particles tie parts of us together across time and space, far beyond our comprehension and outside our control.
“A God Walks into Abar” writes a bit too much this on the screen, letting Dr. Manhattan’s trademark first person narration and a few writerly monologues do some of the heavy lifting where the situations forged do enough of that on their own. But it also realizes its ideas in a way that only this type of fantastical story can: the unknowableness of something emerging seemingly from nothing, whether it’s a man or a world, and the irrevocable pull of love between two people, that causes us to take risks, to make sacrifices, and do everything in our power to reassure and protect, even when fate itself stands in our way.
(Two asides for things that didn’t fit in this review: 1. This was Jeremy Irons’s best episode and his scene with Dr. Manhattan was incredible and 2. My bet is that whoever eats that damn waffle, containing the same egg Manhattan made on his first date with Angela, inherits his powers, and my money’s on their son.)
Swerve swerve swerve. I can't say I'm surprised, it's what Westworld is known for however this felt less organic then before and more like we were intentionally lead down the wrong path just to have the big revelation in the end that we were wrong. Problem is none of it was surprising or inspiring, it didn't make you go "oh what???" like in season 1 when we found out William was the man in black, it just made you go oh whatever...
Maeve switched sides, saw that coming. Dolores wanted to save humanity now? Please... There's a man in black robot? Already knew that, don't care what comes from it. Don't believe Dolores is really dead, don't care if she isn't, don't believe William is either, don't care if he isn't. William didn't end up saving anything, Hale is a bitch again. The only real emotional part of the episode was seeing Bernard visit Arnold's family and that still wasn't even that spectacular. Bernard has the key... to what exactly? Everyone got their catch phrase in. This episode just showed the show's gone on too long and the story is all over the place. To think it's going to keep going feels more like a chore then something to be excited for. With any mercy they end this thing with a 3 or 4 episode arch in season 4 and be done with it.
Alas Westworld, this pain is all I have left of you.
The film has a strong potential worthy of a Black Mirror episode yet the technology presented in the film is not even explored at its finest. The ending felt bleak but is an interesting choice to make the audience come up with their own theories.
Am I the only one who loved this movie?
Sure, it's not perfect. But it shoots for the moon and, in my opinion, mostly succeeds.
I really enjoyed the first half of this season, but the second half forgot to give me reasons to care. In the end I didn't care who lived or who died, I just wondered what the point of any of it is.
Solid movie. A perfect balance of levity and psych thriller. I didn’t come away feeling 100% satisfied, but it was very enjoyable nonetheless.
Is there really 24 episodes this season? I just want it to be over!
Altough I'm german I rarely check out german TV shows. The last one was Deutschland 83 and that was like two years ago. Germany just hasn't figured TV out yet but that's another discussion.
When I heard Netflix was producing a german show I just had to check it out because Netflix has a great track record so far and Germany does have talent infront and behind the camera. But overall I think this show just fell flat. Good, but nothing great.
Fantastic visuals that are shot very beatifull, the actors IMO are mostly great and the music/score can be beautiful but often gets obnoxious. But unfortunetly there are too many characters that are hard to keep track off which distracts from the story.
The story is already confusing enough even without trying to keep up with the many characters over different decades and it heavily sets up future seasons without answering a lot of questions about this one and just left me unsatisfied at the end.
Still worth watching tough IMO and very bingeable similarly to Stranger Things.
But if you do watch it then choose the subbed version. I checked out the dub really quick and it sounded horrible. And also don't browse your phone as you might do on other shows. You're going to miss so much important shit.
EDIT after Season 2:
I'm not actually sure what just happened and what I think about it. But the one thing I'm sure of is that the casting in this show is absolutely phenomenal. The actors look so much like their younger counterparts that I'm not fully convinced they aren't actually related.
Plus the cinematography is still fantastic and the music monatages are really beautiful (and they got rid of those obnoxious sound effects).
And altough the story is still very confusing I found it more easier to follow and more engaging than Season 1 because I now know all the charcters and their background. And it seems that the writers had this all planned out and aren't just making shit up as they go.
Changed my rating from 8 to 9.
EDIT after my first rewatch just before S3 is released.
Changing my rating again. This time to a 10. After S1 I thought it was good but confusing show (8), after S2 I thought it was great and really well thought out one (9). Now after rewatching both seasons for the first time I think the show is fucking masterpiece. (10). Once you can watch it without being confused and actually knowing what is happening your just in awe throughout all of it.
If they stick the landing with season 3 it could be up there with the best ever.
EDIT after Season 3
Masterpiece. Simple as that.
Writing. Directing. Cinematography. Casting. Acting. Soundtrack. Everything is perfect.
I'm going to miss the beautiful music montages at the end.
Deepfake Eleven doesn’t look like a Beetlejuice shrunken head at all, nope, not one bit.
I just want to thank the cinema gods for this absolute dream. It feels like I passed out and when I came to I could remember a very good and satisfying Batman film.
Wow! I mean, there is no other way it could have ended but with Carrie being an asset in another country. Sad that Homeland has ended. I’ll miss this show and Carrie’s craziness.
Episode needed more flash backs, perhaps 5 more.
Ezekiel is blaming the wrong person for Henry’s death. Henry got himself killed by being stupid.
I know Lydia has become a member of the group, but why does Daryl feel overly obligated to protect her? It is to prove a point to Alpha?
Negan proved that he cares for Judith way more than the group does.
I can’t wait to see Negan vs Alpha.
If what Chidi said to Eleanor didn't make you cry, what is wrong with you?
I feel like this season was completely unnecessary. It just wasn't on par with S1 and felt repetitive a lot.
A good episode, as pretty much always, but let's be real here, there's no way Miracle has no town records and your "registration" there stands just on a piece of cheap plastic around your wrist. The bracelets thing is all around ridiculous. They're pretty much the same, have no name on them or an id number, and apparently some of them are easily removable while others' removal requires some drastic hand crashing shit, which becomes even more inane when you realize they need to be adjustable, so Matt' or Mary' bracelet could fit a child' wrist. And what that guy and his son wanted to do once they get into town? Become hobos? How were they even let in without any proof of having a property inside the town? I know a lot of weird shit happens on this show (which I like), but that's not weird, that's illogical in the setting of the world we've been introduced, pretty much it's the first bit of poor writing I've encountered in all of the aired episodes, I'll swallow it and move on, but hopefully this won't become a habit.
