If you watch just one episode of "Mythic Quest," make it this one. You don't even need to watch the pilot to understand it as it's 100% standalone. Just keep in mind the rest of the show is in a very different tone.
This particular episode is a heartfelt meditation on the power of a creative vision and how time threatens it. It's also really well acted and written. Funny, bittersweet, and surprising.
I gotta wonder if maybe this is the show the creators wanted to make from the get-go but had to compromise their vision until it became "Mythic Quest"...
No joke, this single episode is the best Star Wars I've seen since the throne room sequence in Return of the Jedi. I can't think of anything else that comes close except maybe the ending of Rogue One.
Ugh. After last week's excellent episode, this was a major step down and makes me reconsider following this series. The writing was atrocious, with every other character quipping at the worst of times. (Worst offender: Sharon Carter quipping "Blam" after blowing Happy's head off.) Not only that, but the third act turn hangs on a supremely illogical and shitty character decision.
This, to me, is an example of what happens when the MCU "formula" is handled by bad writers. You get this illogical mess that thinks it's way funnier than it is. Hope this is the low point of the series and not a sign of things to come.
That was leagues ahead of the crappy zombie story last episode. The premise is intriguing, and the places the story go are fresh and unpredictable.
Unfortunately, the episode just kinda... ends. Like it ran out of time to tell its full story. Unless there's a second part coming that I missed?
Me: "Andor is a Star Wars show where a lightsaber would feel out of place."
Andor writers: "LOL spaceship lightsabers."
This is the first R&M episode that did nothing for me. The humor felt tired and most of the jokes didn't land.
Not sure if it's just worse than it used to be, or it's just not as fresh to me as it was in seasons 1-2.
This is more "Hell no" than "Halo."
Season 3 has been great so far, but this episode was off the charts. There's so much going on here, so many little quotable moments and hilariously unforeseen turns of events, and every character gets their moment to shine.
This is the first episode for me when the show has lost its shine. I adored the first three episodes and thought episodes 4 and 5 were okay, but man, this one was just terrible.
There are a few reasons I can think of:
The overarching plot has taken a backseat. Episodes 1-4 felt connected by the Mandalorian's quest for redemption through his care for the Child. Episode 4 still felt connected to that overarching goal, but with the last two episodes, we're just watching a "job of the week" conceit that neither moves the characters nor the plot forward. It's basically filler at this point.
Bad Western tropes. While I loved the initial "Western in space" feel of the early episodes, the show was still coming up with its own genre conventions and telling an original story. With episode 6, we're getting a pretty crappy heist gone bad story whose only claim to originality is being set in the Star Wars universe. All the turns were painfully predictable and dictated by the tropes of the genre rather than the characters themselves.
Bad acting. The Twi'leks and the horned guy were just awful. The dialogue was bad, but the way they hammed it up was just painful to watch. Watching the Twi'lek girl hiss at the horned guy felt like watching D&D players hamming it up on game night.
Bad writing. The whole thing was just so unbelievable, from the predictable turns to the way Mando eventually betrays his employer using the beacon to somehow trick a bunch of X-Wings from murdering the station. Not a lot of it made any sense. There's, like, six different shots of the droid hunting down Baby Yoda on the ship that add absolutely NOTHING to the story and just go on forever.
It's not that I don't still look forward to new episodes, but with episode 6, The Mandalorian has gone from "must-watch" to "flawed but watchable." It's the kind of drop you'd expect between seasons 1 and 4, not across a short self-contained season, and it's a damn shame.
I think this is the first episode where the high concept just didn't feel original or interesting. There have been boring episodes before (season 4 has been pretty weak so far), but this one just feels so skippable. Some nice jokes, but otherwise pretty flat.
As with Quantumania,Kang's appearance here does nothing to make the character more compelling. Majors is a great actor, but his performance here was just so weird and off-putting.
I swear, this is the most bats--t insane comicbook thing the MCU has ever produced, and I LOVE it.
I rewatched the miniseries in 2020 and HOLY HELL does it hold up. Blows nearly anything else from the last 17 years out of the water. Now, granted, the show did... falter later on, especially in later seasons, but the miniseries is an incredible achievement and hasn't aged at all in nearly two decades.
"What if Thor had reality-bending dumbness powers?"
A failed attempt at humor and a complete waste of time. Special shout-out to this episode's Darcy for being the most painfully unfunny character in the history of the MCU.
Not as great as the first two episodes.
There just wasn't a lot of forward movement with characters and plot, and having Lily fake schizophrenia without the audience being clued in was a weird choice. I do like how they figured out that the flames were fake. It was obviously done in a rush, and it was not meant to be viewed repeatedly with the ability to pause, so I buy it.
It's a pretty good start, with decent dramatic writing and solid performances. The inciting event is dramatic and well-done enough. That being said, I don't think the unique setting had a chance to shine in this first episode yet. Still, this looks like they're gonna handle the source material with appropriate heft, so I'm quietly optimistic for it. Slow burn, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I give up. Everyone here is raving about this episode, but that's more a statement on how terrible the previous episode was. Honestly, though, this episode had all the flaws that made the previous one so bad.
I could go on and on about why this is terrible, but it all boils down to the fact that the creators seem to care less about this show than the fans. Take, for instance, the moment when the Doctor and Tesla bond over being inventors. It was the most generic, uninspired tripe you could imagine, and fifteen minutes of googling about the psychology of inventors by the scripwriter would have have made this moment pop. But no such luck because the writer obviously didn't care.
It's even worse when you compare this episode with Vincent and the Doctor, with which it shares a lot of themes, albeit in science rather than art. All they had to do was follow the blueprint, but no. This episode could have been extraordinary; instead it's just extraordinarily bad.
A lot of people here seem to hate Trish... I don't, but I still hate this episode. The problem isn't that it's Trish-centric... It's that it's so goddamn boring and pointless. Pretty much everything we see here can be inferred from the first episode, or when it can't, it doesn't add anything at all to the story. There's no dramatic tension to it. NONE.
A 100% skippable episode. Incidentally, this is Krysten Ritter's directorial debut... Big oops there. Better luck next time!
Weakest of a great season. The drug scenes went on too long, and when it transitioned into that whole catfish society nonsense, it just felt weird in a bad way. The emotional core is good, but the episode was a crap way to explore it that broke the usual tone of the series.
Others here have already addressed a lot of the issues I had with this episode, but I just wanna say:
This episode made me feel how I felt watching some classic Doctor Who episodes that were bad, but which I felt I had to get through to get to the good parts. I've never felt like this in the modern era (except perhaps a few bad episodes in Capaldi's first series), but this... The previous Chibnall series were bad, but this just takes the cake.
And can I say? I really don't care for Whittaker's Doctor. I've been watching some clips with the previous modern Doctors, and they all had that magical energy about them, like they were excited about life and wanted to take us on a grand tour of all time and space. Whittaker has nothing of this energy. The writing's largely to blame, but there is something about her performance, too, that lacks a certain depth and quality. I was hoping that, like Capaldi, she would find her footing after a season or two, but her character is actually regressing as we head out into her last appearance.
I like to think that in a few years, when RTD has steered the ship right again, I'll be thinking back to this episode as another one of the dark periods of Who fandom.
Wow, this has to be my favorite Psych episode to date. It has high stakes from the moment the episode starts, and it puts Shawn in genuine danger, which rarely ever happens on the show. All that, plus we get Lassiter and Henry teaming up, and Henry even gets to flex some of that detective muscle.
Yeah, this is a great one!
This episode is starting to lose some of the good will the first two episodes built. 99% of the conflict in this episode was completely contrived, from United Earth not ever talking to Wen, to Burnham AGAIN doing something without telling Saru.
I also wish future-future Earth didn't feel so much like Federation Earth. The crew of the Discovery should be the equivalent of a 12th-century Viking ship landing in modern-day New York Harbor. Instead all we get is a big tree.
Well, that was fun! I liked season 11 well enough, but this was still a clear improvement. Had a great sense of fun, what with the spy nonsense, plus the alien mystery was interesting and unpredictable. A strong start to the new season.
I particularly liked the Doctor in a tux ("Name's Doctor. The Doctor.") and the unexpected appearance of the Master, although I wish the mysterious aliens were not simply one of his plots. Yeah, if the season keeps up this sense of fun, we're in for a cool ride.
I know Black Mirror is all about grim futurism, but goddamn, that episode went hard at it. Too hard, in my opinion: instead of making us think about the perils and moral implications of technology, this episode was a weird horror vengeance porn with some really dark behavior that would never for one second be considered a good idea in the real world.
I mean, episodes like "White Christmas" had their existential horror, absolutely; but this just felt mean-spirited.
"USS Callister" was amazing and "Hang the DJ" was cute, but the rest of this season has been very disappointing.
Lovely episode. I wasn't sure about it throughout, but the ending redeemed it all.
Familiar story that didn't need scifi to be told. The ending was dumb, unsatisfying and over the top.
I'm glad this is how they decided to end the show. No big dramatic turn, no death or anything silly like that... Just a feel-good slice of life as we say goodbye to beloved characters. We know there'll be other trials in their lives, but we also know that, somehow, they're gonna be okay.
Stone and Crenn were robbed. They clearly had the superior dishes (that forest floor one was out of this world), but the point of this episode was to give a boost to Samuelsson because he got his butt handed to him over the course of his episode.
Seriously... Every one of Samuelsson's takes on medieval food was so out of left field. "Medieval food was all about being soft"?!
(Yes, I take Iron Chef way too seriously.)
After a very hit-and-miss season, this finale was nearly flawless and redeems even the poorer episodes. (Okay, maybe not that Dumb Thor one.) An unexpected coming-together of previous episodes gives us action on a cosmic scale never seen before in the MCU, including action moments that put your most over-the-top anime face-offs to shame. Really neat stuff.
Alison Brie was good as Planetina, but nothing about this episode felt surprising or new. Just a run-of-the-mill R&M episode, I guess... I can't think of a single element that I find memorable. Hmm, maybe the fight scene.