That was such an incredibly sad but perfect and correct ending.
I don't understand people who didn't like the ending because their favorite character didn't win. After 4 seasons with these despicable characters did anyone expect the Roy kids to unite and defeat the bad guy with the power of love and friendship? It was never going to end that way.
The three siblings just could never get over their egos. They all proved, through the 4 seasons, that they’re basically useless and the only reason they were ever in the discussion to be CEO is because Logan was their father. They'd rather destroy everything than have only one of the trio take the upper hand. Shiv just could not let her brother have a win, even if it meant her losing as well. Perfectly summed up their whole family dynamic and the show as a whole.
The siblings are so entitled and self-absorbed they never saw Tom coming. They’ve never had to work for a damn thing. I don't like Tom, but it makes sense for someone like Tom, who worked his way from the ground up and earned himself the position he was in.
The scene with the siblings making that awful smoothie and them watching their dad reveal yet another side of himself was so nice among the insanity that came in between.
That penultimate shot with Shiv and Tom in the car was phenomenal. Complete shift in the power dynamic. After marrying him specifically because she thought he was weak enough to keep holding power over.
Kendall not winning every season. That’s rough.
Willa revamping Logan's apartment with a cow print couch.
In the end Conor was the only one to have any kind of a relationship with Logan, the other kids are never shown having moments with him like he did at the recorded dinner.
Greg translating the Swedish in real time is the smartest thing he’s ever done. Four seasons and I cannot for the life of me understand why he would put up with that. His uncle offered him $250mil to get away from the firm.
But the biggest thing for me coming out of this episode is Kendall’s son isn’t really his. It really came out of nowhere and seemed more like a fact than a rumor the way everyone reacted to it.
All in all, Succession stuck to the show’s core till the end. In a way it’s a predictable ending but because it’s television and we expect some twist where a cool character comes out on top we don’t expect the expected. The outcome is pretty much what you’d expect from all the characters knowing their faults
Every year I pick out one or two cheesy christmas movies as part of my holiday season. Last week I watched the mediocre Lindsay Lohan movie and this week I settled on this movie. More cheese, right? Um, no. This movie is good. I mean really good. Sure, there are the occasional reminders that it is the holiday season but it almost certainly is not a holiday movie (although I do expect that the christmas village scene in the middle of the movie was a wink at the audience from the director). First, the two leads have ridiculous chemistry. And it isn't the crappy syrupy kind that we see in so many other xmas movies. The supporting cast is also excellent, of course (Bonnie Bedelia should have been a bigger star). It is the rare movie that completely sucks me in and allows me to give myself up to it. I didn't want it to end. Some reviews were critical of the fact that there is a bit of a mystery in the movie. I don't agree with that sentiment. As I said earlier, this movie would have been just fine on its own if it hadn't gotten tagged with the "holiday" tag.
Finally, the best thing about the movie is that it is subtle. It didn't beat you over the head with the potential for romance. I would image that many people were disappointed in the last scene (probably the same group that hated the ending of the Sopranos) because they didn't show you exactly what happened. The best movies allow the viewer to fill in the blanks. We don't need to see everything on screen to know that something happened. That's not the point.
The worst part about the movie? I think that this movie ruined the Hallmark-ish kinds of movies for me. The movie started in a traditional way and for the first 20 minutes I had the mindset that cheese was on the way. Instead I was blown away. How do I go back to the traditional schlock? Damn you, Netflix.
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[8.6/10] This one was a little more disjointed than some of the prior episodes, but man, the ending. I like the fake out here. Veronica does some legit detective work with the help of Maddie (aka Veronica Jr.). Keith nails down the lead and feeds it to the cops. The cops use it to arrest the bomber. Badda bing badda boom. I’m not saying it’s totally plausible that this season would wrap up its mystery in episode 3, but you can envision Veronica Mars having the bombing be a minor red herring, or accidental entree into some sort of bigger mystery.
The episode actually sells it pretty well too! Fresh off of Patton Oswalt’s character bringing up how Keith had trouble with the Lily Kane murder, and got kicked out of the sheriff’s office for evidence tampering is a nice reminder of past issues with the Mars family being overzealous. Keith himself brings up that Veronica doesn't have more than a hunch to go on that there’s something bigger here, and that they’re known to “tilt at windmills.” You buy it, or at least the threat that this is building a sandcastle out of nothing.
But then, in a moment of calm, when we’re expecting nothing but more silly Dick Casablancas antics, the second bomb goes off. I don’t normally like voiceover in shows, but Veronica’s sarcastic asides and noir-esque monologues always work for me, especially here. The desire to be wrong, to want everything to be okay, only to realize that your instincts are unfortunately right, speaks well of Veronica’s detective bona fides, but poorly of her future safety and mental health. There’s a soft pain to that moment, which is well-directed, as everyone runs away from the blast, the danger, but Veronica can’t help marching into it, time and time again.
But hey, to lighten the mood, “PLAY NO SCRUBS!!!” As indulgent as some of Ryan Hansen’s schtick gets here, it’s nice to just see Veronica and her crew having a bit of fun and being silly at Comrade Quack’s. Again, one of the things that made this show great in its day was despite the dark subject matter, it always had a lighter side, and beyond the show’s classic exchanges, it’s nice to see it still vindicating that side of things.
It’s also nice to see the show following up on Keith Mars’s mobility and memory issues. Clyde getting him into a concierge doctor, and the medical wonderland that follows, is a nice indication of the show’s exploration of classism that’s still in play. It’s also a way for Clyde to ingratiate himself to the people most likely to be investigating his boss and associate.
I’m into what seems to be the larger mystery, namely some kind of conspiracy among the people who were at the prison in Chino: Big Dick, Clyde, Perry Walsh (the bomber), and the guy from the bakery who set the rat at Hu’s grocery, to run some “undesirables” out of town. (That’s also coupled with Veronica’s mugger, who she suspects of being in league with them, being the guy who took dumps in the Sea Sprite ice machines.) Now why do they want to do this? Maybe it’s a real estate scam with Big Dick, or some prison racket through Clyde. Whatever it is, I’m anxious to find out.
I’m less enamored with the continued amount of time devoted to the Congressman Maloof storyline. Him getting kidnapped and beaten by the rednecks, and then kidnapped and threatened with murder by the cartel members feels like things are starting to get far fatched and a little convoluted even for Veronica Mars. But maybe I’m just less excited by the non-Mars parts of the show.
That said, I continue to get a big kick out of the dynamic between the two goons, whose matter of factness and ways of ribbing one another get a big laugh out of me. Plus, we have a Weevil sighting! I was wondering when he was going to get involved!
Otherwise, we have the continued training of Maddie, and reflections on the anger of losing someone close to you at that age, which feels like a nice way to reflect on where the show started. The Patton Oswalt Murder club is less adept at wringing comedy out of that, and feels like the show trying to be meta in a too cute fashion, but it’s brief and light enough to be forgivable.
Overall, this is another winning outing from the revival season, with dramatic twists, some fun moments, and a hell of a beat to go out on.
PSA - Explanation of what the two ladies on the phone are talking about in this episode:
OK I GET it. A "slow burn" show like this isn't everyone's cup o' tea. However, IMO, in the case of "Invasion", it worked well, in that it made you "feel" for the characters, (love OR hate them), while intercutting between stories, all the while avoiding hitting you over the head with monster jump scares, but still teasing you enough to keep you intrigued. A fine line to walk, and, they didn't always do it well. But all in all, a pretty good series, which, especially after the seemingly "easy, tied with a ribbon" NOT ending, and the "we ALL saw that coming" reveal at the NOT end, I am glad is getting a second chance "at bat".
Yes, some of the characters were predictable and annoying, and yet, the one person I wanted dead murked at the start, actually partially redeemed himself, and a couple of the others may, or may not have shed their mortal coils, at least on THIS plane. It will be interesting to see if they can take this beyond the "they came here for our resources" (or our brains) trope, and actually come up with something new(ish). Especially intriguing is the thought that Caspar (and his epileptic visions) could somehow partly be the CAUSE ("they came here for ME") as well as the effect of the arrival, especially with the astronauts Father making an appearance in his dream(?) after (brain) death(?). (Vdub Fringe's "digital back ups?") (but why was the father there?) Trevante Coles BEARD gets an honorable mention as an additional character, as well as Aneesha Malik for actually being a good Mom and not pitting her kids against the Dad by withholding a critical piece of information from them, even (or especially) after his possibly assuming room temperature. (no body, then, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps?)
Yeah, OK, maybe they spent too much time on these character development parts of the plot, but, as I stated earlier, they got me invested in the characters, for better or for worse, and, I look forward to seeing how the "rest of the story" plays out.
Almost the whole time I was watching this movie (including the bath-scene with Margot Robbie) I felt like the biggest idiot on the planet.
I'm not a numbers guy nor do I know all the terminology in American banking and mortgage systems and most of it looked like watching some kind of alien language. In the end though I knew what happened, I saw people warning us for what was about to happen and watched it all crumble down when it did happen.
All in all though it's an excellent portrayal of a system that is quite frankly a big con, stripping away money from those "below" with people at the help that don't really know what they are doing. An intricate web of rules, regulations, lingo, faces and characters who don't know the full picture. I think the movie quite nicely mimicks this chaos in the way it is set up, the catchy camera movements and often loud and noisy environments the scenes play out in. Here's a famous face that will teach you plebs what it's about, "let's simplify this for ya" so you're lured in.
Despite it's dry subject, the vast amout of stuff I personally didn't fully grasp it is a very enjoyable movie that will keep you hooked till the end.
Oh and it took me about at third the movie to realize Brad Pitt was that one guy.
[8.0/10] This one is just made of awesome. It’s nothing but action sequences and fan service, but both are done well! This is the Star Wars equivalent of candy for dinner. There’s little in the way of deeper themes, little in the way of emotion, and little in the way of character development. “The Tragedy” exists just to blow up the status quo in terms of plot and give the fans a rollicking good time, and it succeeds on both counts.
My favorite moment, though, had nothing to do with those rocket-launched fireworks. It was the quiet scene that Dinn and Grogu shared on the Razor Crest before landing on Typhon. Mando doesn’t want to give The Child up. He clearly feels like Baby Yoda’s space dad and has grown close to the little force-sensitive tyke in their time together. But he also realizes that, after testing the kid’s powers and ensuring it’s not a fluke, that Grogu needs to be with someone who can hone his abilities, who can capitalize on the potential this “special” little guy has in store. Mando believes it isn’t him, and however hard it is for them to part, he wants to do what’s right.
Pedro Pascal sells the hell out of the emotions in that scene, what giving up this child who’s changed his life menas to Mando. The puppeteers and sound designers do almost as good as ob on their end, conveying how even if he can’t articulate it exactly, Grogu has an intuitive understanding of what’s about to happen and shares some of his surrogate father’s wistfulness over it.
But then it’s time for some ressurections and firefights. Look, if it was up to me, Boba Fett would stay dead. Hell, as much as I love Ahsoka as a character, if it was up to me, she would have stayed dead too. There’s far too many people who seem to be goners who nevertheless come back to life in Star Wars. Enough with the fakeouts and returns.
Still, if they gotta do it, I like how they did it here. I don’t know that we ever saw signs of Boba Fett being this noble or decent, whether in the Original Trilogy films, Attack of the Clones, or The Clone Wars series. But it works with Temura Morrison’s sand-worn gravitas. The adjustments to his backstory work well, making him the progeny of another Mandalorian foundling, searching for his father’s armor, possessed of similar honor and principles as Dinn is. That doesn’t necessarily line up with the character we’ve known to this point, but it passes the smell test, and makes for a cool character regardless of whether that character matches neatly with Boba Fett.
Plus, Ming-Na Wen is back as Fennec! There too, we have a resurrection that seems like it shouldn’t be possible, but I like the character and the performance so much that I’m willing to let it slide (no pun intended). Fans of Mulan and Agents of Shield like me are excited to have her back in the fold, and robotic midsection or not, the prospect of her and Boba as a team makes for an intriguing one.
If that weren’t enough, director Robert Rodriguez, a proven action director, gives them tons of badass moments to make fans fist-pump. Boba gets two (arguably even three) of them. We see him in his Tatooine survivor form, knocking Stormtroopers around with his Tusken staff like a master. Then, when the show has made the audience wait just long enough, he dons his old armor once again and makes mincemeat out of not only the enemy troopers, but their transport ships. It’s a hell of a coming out party for the character we last saw gobbled up by a sarlacc.
Fennec gets her moment in the sun too, using her sharpshooter abilities to pick off imerials until she’s corner and has to improvise with a giant boulder. Throw in a backwards shooting dive off the rock, and you have anolther badass role for Ming-Na Wen to inhabit.
Mando gets his time to shine too. Beyond his usual rough and tumble style, we get a nice setup and payoff with his use of the whistling bird. More to the point, we see how much he strains and struggles to reach Baby Yoda, and how he resolves to protect The Child when retrieving him proves impossible. I don’t know who Grogu is communing with in that bright blue beam, but I’m excited at the possibilities, and it makes for a great escort mission for Dinn and his fellow bounty hunters.
And yet, this one ends, true to the title, in tragedy. The dark troopers zoom down and kidnap Grogu before our heroes can stop them. Moff Gideon’s ship blasts the Razor Crest, leaving Mando without a vessel to go off in search of his adopted son. Gideon himself bests The Child, wearing the kid’s force powers out on mooks before taunting him and eventually caging him. It’s the most distress we’ve seen our favorite little tridactyl in since last season’s finale.
But there is, true to this franchise, hope. Boba and Fennec guaranteed The Child’s safety if Mando returned Fett’s armor, so now they’re committed to helping him rescue Grogu. Cara Dune (ugh) is willing to use her position as a New Republic Marshal to help spring Bill Burr (ugh) to track down the evil Moff. There’s not a lot of depth to this, but the pieces are moving in exciting ways, and there’s a clear path between here and the end of the season,
That’s a good thing. Despite its name, “The Tragedy” is more like a basket of quadruple layer nachos rather than an elegantly-cooked meal, but it goes down easy all the same. I’ll take thrills and unexpected returns by the barrelful when they’re this good.
[7.6/10] Holy cow, there’s a lot to unpack here. This was the most disjointed of the episodes so far, with a slew of former guest stars returning in a somewhat haphazard fashion, and fewer throughlines to unite everything.
So let’s cover those guest stars! We have the two culprits from season 3 playing the Hannibal Lecter game with Veronica in season 3. We have Max (Mac’s old boyfriend) as the owner of the dispensary on the boardwalk. And we even have the triumphant return of Vinny Van Lowe, in all of Ken Marino’s usual glory, as a separate P.I. hired by Mrs. Maloof to track down the family ring. It’s a minor thrill to see these people again, but everything is so glancing that it feels like more of a case of “hey, remember that guy!?” than naturally adding them to the story. (Though meethinks we haven’t seen the last of Vinny.)
Heck, I was even a little come-see come-saw about the return of Leo, and he was my favorite of Veronica’s love interests back in the show’s original run. I don’t know what it is, but the dynamic between him and Veronica isn't as easy or natural as it was back in the day, and the two of them talking about their romantic lives on a stake out feels pretty contrived. He’s still a welcome presence, and I like that he’s an FBI agent assigned to the bomber case because of local ties, but right now he feels more like a device than a character. (Though my favorite part of the episode was his awkward interactions with Logan, and Logan ensuing query of whether Piz was hiding in the back somewhere.)
Oddly enough, the best pairing in this episode was between Keith and Clyde. There’s something endearing about the two old guys trading war stories together, even if the show seems to want you to think that Clyde is playing Keith to some extent. It also gives Veronica a chance to be clever when she uncovers what’s in Clyde’s bag from the hardware store.
Oh, and I almost forgot the return of Weevil! I like the fact that he got to save Veronica’s behind here, showing his continued loyalty, but also remaining sort of a tweener on the good/bad divide, since he’s fallen into chop shops and working with local “hoodlums.” He gets the line of the episode when Veronica chastises him for these things, “It must be nice to have choices,” which sums up the show’s complicated take on racial and class divides, letting its protagonist be self-righteous but also flawed and, at times, myopic about where she sits in the social order.
I have to admit that I’m a little tired of The Murderheads. I do like that Maddie goes to them because she doesn't know where to turn after overhearing the Mars family’s theory, and that the Murderheads, in turn, blow up the Mars family’s spot by broadcasting the hypotheses Veronica and Keith are still running to ground in an explosive town council meeting. Still, the comedy stuff with that crowd has gotten a little too broad for my tastes.
But the mystery stuff is coming together at least. We’re getting more pieces falling into place for the whole “real estate plot from Big Dick” theory, with shell companies buying up boardwalk businesses. That said, it’s way too early for an answer to the central mystery to be that clear and that right this early. So my new theory is that the owner of Comrade Quacks is behind the bombings, meaning to teach the assulting douches of Neptune a lesson, given who’s ended up dead so far.
I’ll admit that I’m a little worn out by the Congressman Maloof story, which feels a little more exaggerated than the rest. (Give or take a neck bomb.) Him being faked out and presumably extorted by the cartel guys is a little much, and the same goes for the hillbillies being found in the desert. I like that they’re bringing the cartel folks closer to Veronica’s orbit, but until then, it just feels like a distraction.
Oh, and I almost forgot that Dick is pretty damn funny in this one! Him landing in a Lifetime X-mas movie in Romania about a woman who falls in love with two mannequins is the kind of comedic specificity that I get a big kick out of.
Overall, this one was not as strong or cohesive as some of the past episodes of this season, but there’s still good stuff to enjoy along the way.
Set aside the last few minutes of the finale for a moment. That last little reveal changes the shape of the episode, and the series, in significant and meaningful ways that make it easy to let it overshadow the rest of the episode. But stop and think about everything that happens here before the scene where he finally meets The Mother.
Because it is, at best, a mixed bag, long before we see the blue french horn again.
I understand the urge to give the audience some idea of what happens to the gang between 2014 and 2030. The problem is that covering a decade and a half in one big episode makes every story feel rushed and underdeveloped. One of the great things about HIMYM is how it used the past and the future to inform the present. Jumping back and forth between a prior conversation and a current one could be the crux of a joke, as could Future Ted's knowing commentary on some boneheaded mistake or unexpected development that was coming down the pipe. But those time jumps weren't just fodder for comedy, as the show did a great job of creating dramatic irony and emotional stakes by showing what lie ahead or the path that led us here. But by compressing fifteen years worth of life developments into an hour, nothing has time to really breathe or feel like it has the temporal scope the show is shooting for.
After all, there's a great story to be told about the gang drifting apart over the years. Another one of the series's best features is the way it combines the exaggerated goofiness of its comedic sensibilities with real, relatable aspects of being in your twenties and thirties. Well, one of the things that hits you once you start to move past that stage of your life is the way that friends, even good friends, can slowly drift apart, not through neglect or anger or hurt feelings, but just because you're suddenly at different places in your life. That's an idea worth exploring.
The problem is that the rush of years in "Last Forever" makes this process feel like something sudden instead of gradual. Sure, we see the chyron at the bottom of the screen showing that we've jumped ahead a year or two, and there's a boatload of semi-clunky expositional dialogue in the episode to let the viewer know where everyone is in their lives and what they're up to, but when all those developments take place over the course of just a few minutes and just a few scenes, it can't help but seem very fast.
One of the best choices HIMYM's creators made in the final season was to parcel out little scenes of the gang's future throughout, giving us a glimpse of what the future held without trying to pack it all into one big episode like this. Sprinkling those flashforwards in did a nice job at making the group's future feel as well-populated as its present and its past. Obviously there were limitations on how much they could do this in prior episodes given the reveals in store for Barney and Robin and Ted, but the method the show chose to relay the gang's future almost inevitably leaves it feeling too quick, too underdeveloped, and too unsatisfying, even apart from the directions the individual stories go.
Those plot developments, however, are another albatross around the finale's neck. The first and most obvious problem comes from Barney and Robin's divorce. Again, there's a legitimate story to be told of two people who care deeply for one another, but don't work as a couple, but it's a difficult story to tell in five minutes, especially when you've spent huge chunks the past season and a half trying to convince the audience that they make sense together. As someone who's been a Barney and Robin skeptic from the beginning, it's entirely plausible to me that the two of them could mean well and have real feelings for one another, but still end up divorced due to some basic incompatibilities. But the reason for their split feels thin here.
There's nothing we know about Barney that suggests globetrotting would be something he's so against. And while there's hints of bigger issues between the two of them, like not getting to see one another or not being on the same page about their respective plans and projects, we never really get to see these problems develop. We're just told about them, and expected to accept that as enough to break them up one episode removed their wedding. Is that result plausible enough based on what we know about Barney and Robin? Sure, but it's just presented to us, rather than developed before our eyes, and since we don't see their path from pledging to spend the rest of their lives together to getting divorced, that end point feels like it happens by fiat rather than something the show earned.
Barney's reversion afterward is just as unsatisfying. Again, there's a believable story about Barney having worked so hard to become a better person, in part to woo Robin, and reverting to his old tricks as a retreat and defense mechanism when his marriage falls apart. But because of the rapidity with which the finale goes from Point A to Point B, it doesn't feel like the natural result of a difficult event; it feels like throwing nine years of character development down the drain in less than a minute. There's a disparity between how much time the show spent building Barney up as more than just an cartoonish hound dog and how much time it spends showing him reverting to his old persona. That cannot help but feel jarring.
What kills me is that I love where they take Barney in "Last Forever." There's something beautiful about the idea that what really changes him isn't some conquest or accomplishment or even a great romance; it's becoming a father. For Barney, "The One" isn't a woman he'll meet some day; it's his daughter, and Neil Patrick Harris delivers a tremendous performance in the scene where he repeats his Ted-like plea, this time to his baby girl. It's a wonderful scene, but the path the episode takes to get there still comes off as a shortcut that has to ignore seasons of character development in order to make it work.
The finale isn't all bad though. While the story of the gang drifting apart is too quick, the scene where they all reunite for Ted's wedding is legitimately touching and full of the good will and warm feelings that the show's been able to generate during its run. Ted and Tracy (I can use her name now!) continue to be adorable together, and the twist that romantic Ted made it five years and two kids into his relationship before he actually married The Mother is a small but effective way to show how much the substance of finding The One was more important to him than the formality of it (even if he was planning on a European castle). It's one of those lived-in details that speaks to his character.
Beyond that, the actual meeting of The Mother is very well done, and it really had to be. Sure, there's a few meetcute cliches involved, but the easy rapport between Ted and Tracy soars once again and nearly saves the entire finale. After all, this was the moment the "Last Forever" had to nail, and it did. Ted and Tracy's conversation weaves in enough of the yellow umbrella mythos for everything to click, and Joshua Radnor and Cristin Miloti both sell the subtle realization that this is something special. For an episode that had to make good on the promise of its title, that meeting went about as well as any fan of the show might have hoped for.
And if the series had ended there, everyone might have gone home happy. Sure, the other problems with the rushed and shortcut-filled finale might have rankled a bit (particularly the way it undoes the wedding we'd just witnessed), but making that moment feel as big and as meaningful as it needed to after all that build up is no small feat, and that alone would have bought Bays & Thomas a hell of a lot of slack.
Frankly, the series could have still gotten away with Tracy dying shortly thereafter, another controversial choice in the finale. There's something tragic but beautiful about the audience watching Ted seek out the woman of his dreams for nine years and then realizing that he only gets to be with her for the same amount of time, while still cherishing and being thankful for the time the two of them had, for that connection and love that was wonderful and worth it no matter how all too brief it may have been. There's a touching theme about the fragility of things in that story, but also about the joy that comes from finding the person you love, that stays with you even after they're gone. It's sad, but it's sweet, in the best HIMYM way.
And then there's Robin.
The decision to pair up Ted and Robin in the last moments of the finale is as tone-deaf and tin-eared an ending as you're likely to find in a major television program, and the reasons abound. The most obvious is that the show devoted so much time to the idea of Ted getting over Robin, and had any number of episodes (the most recent being the execrable "Sunrise") where Ted seemed to have achieved that, to have moved on in his life. Folks like me may try to handwave it, and the show can call back to the premiere of Season 7 where Ted and Robin can declare that all you need for love is chemistry and timing, but at base, Ted and Robin getting together feels like it contradicts so much about the two characters' relationship with one another over the years. So much of the final third of the show involved going over the same beats between Ted and Robin over and over again, of having each move past the other, and coming back to them in the final, despite how iconic that blue french horn has become for the show, just feels like another poorly-established cheat or retcon that isn't in sync with where the show went since that finale was crafted in Season 2.
What's worse is that that ending transforms the story Ted's been telling from a heartwarming if irreverent yarn about the path that led to him meeting the love of his life, to a smokescreen to gain his kids' approval for dating an old flame after their mother's death. Look, to some degree you have to accept the conceit of the show for what it is and not take it too seriously. In real life, no two kids would sit through such a long story, and no father should tell his children about all the women he slept with before he met their mom. But taken in broad strokes, How I Met Your Mother is a story about how all the events in Ted's life, big and small, good and bad, planned or unexpected, went into making him the person who was ready to find Tracy and capable of being with her.
Future Ted himself put it best in "Right Place, Right Time." He tells his kids "There's a lot of little reasons why the big things in our lives happen." He explains that what seemed like chaos was bringing him inexorably toward the best person and the best thing to ever happen to him, that there were "all these little parts of the machine constantly working, making sure that you end up exactly where you're supposed to be, exactly when you're supposed to be there." And he tells them at the time, he didn't know "where all those little things were leading [him] and how grateful [he]'d be to get there."
That, to my mind, is the theme to take from this great, if tainted show. Sure, it's unrealistic that anyone would go on that many tangents in telling the story of their great romance, but the point is that each of these moments, each of these people, were crucial in who he was and who he became when he met Tracy, and that they were as important as that fateful meeting was. Yes, it's a long story, and it has many many detours, but it's the story of all the twists and turns and bumps in the road that brought Ted into the arms of his soulmate, and that smooths over the rougher edges of the show's premise.
Instead, the twist that it's all supposed to be about Ted having the hots for Robin turns that lovely story into a long-winded attempts by a middle-aged man to convince his kids that he should date their aunt That seems much more crass. There's still meaning to be wrung from it, meaning that finds parallels with Tracy and her dead boyfriend Max and the idea that you can have more than one meaningful relationship in your life. But it doesn't add up with what the show had really done to that point. The past nine seasons were no more about Robin than they were about Barney or Marshall or Lily. They no more feel like a way to suggest that Aunt Robin's good dating material than they do that Ted should spend more time with Uncle Barney. As great as that blue french horn was the first time, it had meaning because it represented something we knew was going to end, but which still had beauty and value despite that. This last time we see it, it's represents the opposite, that something beautiful has ended, and the value it had is cast aside in favor of a relationship the series spent years disclaiming. That is deeply, deeply unsatisfying.
Take away those final few scenes, concocted in a different era of the series, and you have a flawed but still potent finale, that delivers on the show's biggest promise and gives the gang one last "big moment" together. But add them back in, and you have an ending to the series that not only runs counter to so much of what the show developed over the course of its run, its final season in particular, but which, moreover, cheapens the story the audience had been invested in for the past nine years. It's almost impressive how a couple of truly terrible moments can do such retroactive damage to such a longrunning show , but here we are, with a sour taste in our mouth from such an ill-conceived finish.
Future Ted was right, a little moment can have a big impacts, and the one at the end of the series is a doozy in that regard. But maybe, just maybe, when we tell our own stories about How I Met Your Mother, we can do what Ted should have done many times -- just leave that part out. There's something wonderful to be gleaned from the ending to this fun, optimistic, heartfelt, and occasionally very rocky series, but it requires us to do what we always do when looking back on things: focus on the good stuff, make our peace with the bad stuff, and remember it at its best.
This episode was insane, so much happened! I can't believe it's the 8th episode, and finally something happened this season. The focus of season 3 being more on the company, not on the family is a minus for me because we know the Roys can’t lose the company, otherwise the show would be over.
Best episode of this season. I don't even know where to begin:
"Happiest Man/Bullet Proof Candidate" - How Connor proposed to Willa at his siblings' mother's wedding, and then pretending Willa accepted the marriage proposal. So much cringe.
"I may not love you, but I do love you" - The real tea is that Shiv meant every single word she said to Tom during their ‘dirty talking'.
"Your father never saw anything he loved that he didn’t wanna kick it just to see if it would still come back." - Shiv and her mom scene was amazing. So much hatred and hurt being shown.
The Kendall/Logan dinner scene! Logan used his grandson as a royal taste tester, he's truly a monster.
Shiv trying to get both Roman and Geri out the way by weaponizing the harassment against Gerri is a next level snake move. She is the most awful girlboss feminist ever.
I'm not interested in any Greg storyline. It seems to me the writers don't know what to do with him so they just put him in this random dull side plot that nobody cares about.
Why do people think Kendall died? As if the show would go there and lose one of their stars. That's actually my biggest problem with season 3 - the show just seems afraid to walk through any of the doors it opens. It doesn't want to disappoint fans with the direction it takes, do anything interesting, or follow through.
I can't believe we only have 1 episodes left and everyone is basically still on the sides we started out at. This season was promoted like there would be a split in the group, a war, like characters would be stabbing each other in the back, but nobody ended up joining Kendall, they're really turning him into a caricature this season, he has been taking Ls for the past like 7 episodes. Season 3 is definitely not nearly as good as season 2, what is basically a perfect season of television.
[7.6/10] Solo has the scruffy confidence to be its own movie. Of the ten Star Wars films, it’s the only so far not to tie directly into the events of the main saga. That alone makes it interesting and laudable as the first real cinematic step of Star Wars ceasing to be a film series and starting to be a “cinematic universe.”
Which isn’t to say the film isn’t closely connected to its predecessors. Solo reveals how Han and Chewbacca first became a team. It features the first meeting between its title character in Lando Calrissian. It even shows how Han ended up with the Millenium Falcon. And that’s setting aside references to a “gangster on Tatooine” and hints of a growing rebellion and familiar characters popping up in unexpected places. Make no mistake -- the film is certainly interested in reminding its viewers where all these characters will be in ten years time.
But it’s also good enough not to be about that. Solo is part-heist flick and part coming-of-age film. It’s more interested in Han’s big adventure in this movie and how he gets to be the sarcastic smuggler we meet in A New Hope than it is in how he fits into the broader Star Wars Universe, to the film’s benefit. The promise of these “Star Wars stories” is that they can use the diverse, elaborate world that George Lucas and his collaborators created to spin all kinds of yarns untethered to the concerns of the Skywalker family. Solo still anchors its story on familiar faces, but tells its own tale, and comes out the better for it.
The big problem with Solo is that it has two modes: (a.) irreverent action/adventure flick filled with colorful characters and (b.) semi-serious interrogation of What Han Solo Is™, and it’s much more entertaining and effective at the former than the latter. The script, penned by Empire Strikes Back scribe Lawrence Kasdan and his son Jonathan, does a superb job at introducing all these figures, old and new, and then letting them bounce off on another in the confines of a rickety old ship and a job pulled at various rough-and-tumble locales. But it falters when trying to use that setup to get at its title character’s true nature.
The film’s thesis on that front is a solid one -- that he is unavoidably rough around the edges, and wants to be “bad,” but deep down he’s good. That is, after all, his essential arc in the Original Trilogy, where a seemingly good-for-nothing smuggler is revealed to have a heart of gold and sympathies to the cause of the Rebellion, or at least his friends. Solo retraces that arc a bit, and weakens Han’s progression in the saga films a little in the course of that, but the Kasdans get Han: the talk that’s bigger than his paydirt, the cocksure improvisational confidence, and the innate goodness that peaks through his rough-hewn if charming exterior which he’ll deny to the end.
The film just does a much better job of showing us those qualities through Han’s actions and attitude than in having various other characters ham-fistedly comment on it and wax rhapsodic about who he’s been and who he’ll be.
The best parts work, as they must, thanks to Alden Ehrenreich, who takes over the role originated by Harrison Ford in 1977’s A New Hope. Following in those iconic footsteps is a tall order, but Ehrenreich makes it work. He doesn't stoop to doing an impression of Ford, short of a few conspicuous mannerisms, but still manages to capture the character’s rakish charm and overconfident, anything goes spirit. Yes, it’s a little hard to grok that this guy becomes 70s era Harrison Ford in ten years, but Ehrenreich absolutely works as Young Han, and the movie wouldn’t work at all without that.
The other characters that populate the film vary a bit more, but are largely fun and entertaining. Woody Harrelson’s turn as Beckett sees him filling the weathered good ol’ boy niche he’s carved out for years now. Emilia Clarke does fine as Qi'ra, who manages to be a little bit more than just Han’s love interest, but only a little. Donald Glover’s charisma carries the day as he inhabits Young Lando, but occasionally he comes across like Glover doing his best Lando impersonation than a fully convincing character (though his chemistry with Ehrenreich sparkles over that nicely). And there’s plenty of other fun, if seemingly disposable side characters, like Paul Bettany’s genteel but menacing villain, Dryden Vos, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge as a delightfully irrepressible droid revolutionary named L3. Even relative newcomer Joonas Suotamo brings character beyond the fur to Chewbacca, alongside Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt’s traditional groans and growls.
When Solo deploys these characters well, it’s a hell of an action-filled romp. Seeing Han’s Oliver Twist-esque origins blossom into his up-and-down efforts to live on the fringes of both the law and the galaxy are fun and thrilling. The movie takes the viewer to new, scrappier corners of the galaxy, packing the frame with wild new creatures and settings that help make Star Wars feel big and diverse again.
Han’s goals and wants are clear; his compatriots are well-if-quickly sketched, and the set pieces are nicely chaotic and spontaneous, as befits the way any plan involving Solo should shake out. The pacing is off here and there, and certain action sequences extend to the point of exhaustion (likely a casualty of the hand off from the nixed boundary-pushers Phil Lord & Christopher Miller to steady hand Ron Howard). But the core setting of the film -- a band of well-traveled and wannabe outlaws does a job with pitfalls and smart remarks -- works like gangbusters.
Then, the final act hits, and the film stops being fun and starts being serious. There’s double-crosses on double-crosses, heavily sign-posted character-defining choices, and cliché, ponderous statements about who Han is supposed to be or can’t be or might have been that one time (we’re not really sure).
Solo, like its protagonist, has its heart in the right place here. It’s laudable to try to turn this adventure into something revealing about one of the franchise’s biggest characters and not just an empty-calorie escapade. But the film can’t support the weight of that introspection (not to mention all of that clunky extrospection) and becomes bogged down when trying to unravel both its less-compelling plot threads and its character study in one big convoluted finale.
But one thing is for sure. This movie is not about the Skywalkers. Despite an eyebrow-raising tie-in, it is not about the broader Star Wars Universe. It’s about Han Solo, and It is, for the first time, a genuinely independent Star Wars story. For most of its run time, Solo is a standalone (if franchise-winking) adventure from the days when Han was still cutting his teeth as a smuggler and outlaw. The film has its problems when it departs from that, but still shows the benefits, and the fun, of Star Wars movies that follow the lead of Solo himself and aim to go it alone.
[8.2/10] There is no show on television that threads the needle between symbolism and literalism better than Better Call Saul. Part of the show’s success, and that of its predecessor, stem from the fact that it works equally well as an exciting story as it does a commentary on human nature and what relationships with bad or shady people do to us. No character represents that idea better in “Fall” than Kim Wexler.
The scene with her out on the Texas-New Mexico border to interface with her new client works well as foreshadowing, and as a sign that Kim is trying to take on too much by herself and coming close to suffering for it. When her car gets stuck in the dirt, she has so much going on, another tight deadline to meet to try to make up for Jimmy’s possible shortfall, that she tries to take care of it all herself. She find a nearby board, heaves and pushes on the car until it budges, and panics when it starts heading toward a nearby oil derrick. Only by racing into the driver’s seat and slamming on the breaks at the last minute does she avoid a grisly wreck.
It functions as a sign that Kim is juggling too many balls, that she’s letting small but important details slip, with her car as a particular conduit for this idea, in a way that could come back to bite her.
But it also functions as a larger metaphor for what Kim’s going through with Jimmy. She has a problem of being stuck in the muck herself -- with the threat of Chuck’s machinations to get his brother disbarred and Jimmy’s ensuing suspension putting pressure on her to carry the firm. So Kim does what she always does -- she pushes and pushes and pushes until she can get things moving again. Little does she realize that in all that pushing, she may be headed for disaster, and it’s only her frantic heroics that allow her narrowly avoid it. Sooner or later, those heroics will come up short, sooner or later, trying to expend all of her efforts to keep Jimmy out of that muck will backfire on her. It’s only so long that she can go to such lengths and avoid that crash.
Everyone’s hustling hard to avoid a crash in “Fall,” though most of the plots of the episode involve financial decisions rather than ones involving dirt and chrome. That includes Mike who, in a brief scene, does his due diligence with Lydia to make sure he’s putting his name down with the right people, but it also includes Jimmy, who is pushing hard to speed up the timing of his payment from the Sandpiper case.
To that end, he finds roundabout ways of putting pressure on Irene, the named plaintiff, in settling the case so that he gets his percentage of the common fund. That means, plying her with cookies to take a look at the latest letters advising her as to the status of the case. It means giving her a free pair of walking shoes to make her look like a big spender. And it means going so far as to rig a bingo game to make it look like fortune keeps smiling upon her at the expense of all her friends and erstwhile well-wishers.
Many of these sequences are funny. It’s amusing to see Jimmy decked out in full mall-walker gear as he puts in plan into motion. There’s something undeniably entertaining about Jimmy being ensconsced in a spirited session of chair yoga when turning Irene’s friends against her. And it’s enjoyably silly hearing him play “let’s you and him fight” while playing innocent in the Sandpiper lobby. There is a prosaic quality to Jimmy’s treachery here, and his million dollar payday requiring him to hobnob with a pack of old ladies creates a certain amount of inherent farce.
But it also brings a cruelty, a cavalier and callous quality to the story. Jimmy is not entirely without scruples – there is a moment of hesitation, a momentary wince, when he sets the rigged bingo balls into the chamber – but in the end he’s willing to turn poor, innocent Irene into an outcast, to leave her crying in a back room from the ostracism, to get what he wants. That’s who Jimmy is. When he’s in a tight spot, it doesn’t matter that this is someone who is kind to him, who trusts him, who was his key to getting the Sandpiper case in the first place – he wants what he wants and he’ll do what he needs to do to get it, regardless of how dishonest, crafty, or cruel he has to be to do it.
The same, appropriately enough, is true for Chuck in “Fall.” When the malpractice insurance providers show up and declare that they’ll double the premiums on every lawyer in the firm so long as Chuck is in practice there. Chuck vows to see them in court, and Howard, initially kindly and then more forcefully, suggests that Chuck ought to retire. Howard tells his partner that there’s a place for him at the local law school, and less gently, that he no longer trusts Chuck’s judgment.
It’s easy to see Howard as just as mercenary as anyone here (including Jimmy, whom Howard accuses of being like Golem as he tries to move a settlement along), but he’s not wrong. Chuck seems to legitimately be a great legal mind, and he genuinely appears to be getting better, but he has his vendettas, his blindspots, his irregularities that, understandable or not, have made him a liability to the firm he helped create. It’s hard to accuse Howard of any sort of altruism in this, but he’s been supportive of Chuck, stood by him, and it’s not unreasonable for him to reflect and say that Chuck is doing more harm than good to the company that bears his name.
But Chuck doesn’t care about that. He doesn’t care about outrageous premiums or putting his firm’s good name on the line as part of a byzantine plan to catch his brother in the act, or even about destroying his firm by trying to cash out his share. He puts on a show for Howard, one that sees him having turned the lights on and used an electric mixer to try to puff himself up in front of a friend-turned-adversary, to show Howard that he is not the crazy man who ranted and raved on the stand but a sharp thinker making great strides who can either be a vital asset or a one-man poison pill depending on which side Howard chooses.
That’s the thing about Chuck, and his brother for that matter. They are willing to destroy, or threaten to destroy, the lives and livelihoods of the people around them to achieve their own goals, and damn the consequences. (Those consequences may, providently enough, make Howard more likely to want to settle the Sandpiper case in order to have some liquidity and cash on hand.) Even the people close to them, who have helped them and looked out for them, are not immune from suffering in their wake.
That catches up with Kim in the end. She can’t celebrate with a miffed Jimmy when he brings in a fancy bottle of booze in honor of his scheme to prompt a settlement working, because she has to do much to do to try to cover his behind. There’s been hints that her efforts to do it all herself rather than deal with her lingering concerns about Jimmy were going to hurt. There’s the five-minute naps in the car before meetings at Mesa Verde. There’s the near-miss out at the oil derrick. There’s other instances where simply being proximate to all this mess has put Kim in harm’s way.
As always, the show shoots it beautifully. There’s something quietly ominous about the silence in the car after Kim rehearses her speech. The scenery outside the window starts to fade away. Suddenly, in a blink, the accident hits. She moans in pain as she pulls herself from the wreckage. Her carefully-crafted binders blow away in the wind. Smoke billows into the austere New Mexico landscape as she surveys the tumble of metal and legal documents before her. This is, despite all her efforts, despite all her attempts to carry everything on her own back, something unavoidable.
That’s the rub of “Fall” and of Better Call Saul. Except when facing one another, the McGill brothers almost always get what they want. They know how to work the system, to tilt things in their favor, to intimidate or challenge or call the bluff of whomever is standing in their way. And because of that, they rarely suffer.
But the people around them do. The people who care about them, who try to help them, who do anything to tarnish their pride or their patience end up worse for being in the unfortunate orbit of these two men, just as Nacho’s father is worse for his son’s association with the Salamancas. It’s never Jimmy or Chuck who has to face the consequences, has to stomach the hardships of their failings or difficulties -- it’s the poor old lady made a pariah so that Jimmy can have a payday, it’s the man who stood by Chuck until it threatened to destroy his firm, and it’s the smart, decent woman who became Jimmy’s confidante, accomplice, and caretaker, straining to keep the two of them from ruin, and finding herself asleep at the wheel, surrounded by crushed chrome and the detritus of her meticulous work.
There is no escaping the McGill brothers. There is no fixing them or correcting them or saving them. There is only the doomed efforts that emerge in their wake, that inevitably end in a crash.
I rarely assign the highest possible rating here, but "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" simply blew me away. The first movie was almost perfect, with an incredibly varied animation style, good characters, and an exciting and humorous story. The sequel is now a flawless expansion of these elements. This time, for example, even more different animation styles are blended, and the result is simply stunning.
The voice actors are also strong again. I was especially pleased to see Spider-Gwen's (Hailee Steinfeld) role expanded significantly, as her story perfectly complements Miles' (Shameik Moore). And the return of Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson) provides a good laugh or two. Oscar Isaac as Spider-Man 2099, the Indian Spider-Man (Karan Soni), and the villain The Spot (Jason Schwartzman) are also clear highlights. There are also numerous Easter eggs that can't all be discovered during a single viewing. For fans of the comics, "Across the Spider-Verse" is one hell of a treat.
This is not least due to the fact that the story is once again very strong. While the first part was perhaps held back a bit by the fact that it was also an origin story, there's no holding back this time. The focus is on the multiverse, and it has never been done so well and creatively in any Marvel movie. Amidst all the spectacle, there is also time for smaller moments and character development. Scenes with Miles and his family, as well as Gwen and her father, stand out in particular.
Overall, "Across the Spider-Verse" is a perfect Spider-Man film. Looking ahead to the sequel, which will fortunately already be released in March 2024, my expectations couldn't be higher.
[8.0/10] I both like and hate what this episode’s doing.
I like and hate it at the same time because it’s yet another self-induced tragedy from BoJack. He does the softball interview with the flattering reporter. He admits to his most serious misdeeds in public, but couches them in enough talk of remorse and addiction that he comes off looking good, maybe even great.
He’s fawned over in public again. He’s waved at by adoring fans. He doesn't have to pay for coffee. In short, he’s receiving adoration and attention again, and being BoJack, he wants more. So he can’t leave well enough alone. He has to go back on the same show for a second night of admissions, and the implication is that it’s the beginning of his downfall. He just couldn’t leave well-enough alone. He had to grandstand, and it’s likely to destroy him.
It’s sad, because Bojack seemed so close to turning a corner. You’re happy for him in some ways that he’s getting a second chance to live a good life and be a good person. You hate that he shoots himself in the foot.
But there’s also a part of it that’s good. We like BoJack. We want him to succeed. He’s our protagonist and we understand him. He’s also done some terrible shit, shit that he deserves to face the music for. We know the causes of that terrible behavior are complex, but we also know that he’s hurt a lot of people, and seeing him be able to skate on by with the same “I’m sorry, I’ve changed” rhetoric that puts off Diane and Todd isn’t a good thing.
I kind of hate the way that the reporter treats Bojack. The episode sets up a Frost/Nixon-esque wake-up call from Paige to the softball reporter, to get her to play hardball, and it makes for a tense scene. Biscuits blindsides BoJack. She asks him the hardest questions one-after-another without him being able to think them through. She paints the most unflattering portrait she can. She takes certain events out of context. She picks the worst moments of his life and tries to connect them in ways that, at times, at least seem unfair. Emotionally, I hate seeing a protagonist whose struggle the audience has come to empathize with treated so brusquely.
I also hate the way BoJack responds to all of it. I hate the way he throws Sharona under the bus for Sarah Lynn’s first taste of alcohol. I hate the way he hurts Princess Carolyn by saying he never loved the women he’s been with so soon after she tells him she’s standing by him because he’s her great love. I hate the way he retreats to his old standards of minimizing and deflecting and blaming everyone but himself.
But most of all, I hate that Biscuits (and by extension, Paige) is right. It’s a stretch to say that, through the events we’ve seen at least, BoJack gets off on having power over the almost exclusively younger women he dates and pursues. It feels like revisionist history to say that’s what motivates him. And yet, it’s entirely fair to say that BoJack is someone who has power over people, many of them women, and who uses and abuses it without thinking. BoJack is not the deliberate monster that Biscuits’s interview technique paints him as, but he is, assuredly, an oblivious monster.
BoJack didn’t hurt Sarah Lynn or Princess Carolyn or Penny or Gina or others who possessed less power than he did intentionally. He did it selfishly, because he only cared about what he wanted, and didn’t consider whether and how that could override what they wanted, that however consensual some of those situations were, there we imbalances which cast a shadow over every choice he and they made, and it’s the type of imbalance that BoJack never paid heed to. The result is a score of people who’ve been hurt and broken in his wake, including the people closest to him.
BoJack seems to know, after PC’s admonition, that this is now something of a last meal for him, that the three hours before the story hits are his last chance to enjoy the admiration and respect that caused him to go back on camera before he becomes a pariah. So he goes to a comedy club where Kaz once set him up. A chance encounter lets him reflect on the joy he used to bring to people. And he goes up in front of people and makes them laugh, able to appear like this in public, unencumbered and even loved, for what may be the last time.
It’s a tough pill to swallow. But I like it for the same reason that Diane seems to. When presented with this list of misdeeds, this pattern of taking advantage of his power whether he knows it or not, of the outline of the person his actions have created, Biscuits asks if it fits him. BoJack says yes. For all his deflection, for all his ill-conceived, on-the-spot arguments to the contrary, for once he says that however much he may quibble with the details and claim that he’s turned the page, that picture she paints is assuredly of him.
There’s an irony there. The BoJack we see is, perhaps, truly different, willing to accept responsibility and capable of understanding the types of harms he’s caused to the point that he will internalize and publicly acknowledge them. Diane’s raised eyebrow signifies that this is a man (er, horse) who has genuinely changed, genuinely accepted what he’s done and more importantly, who he was and is. And yet, the thing that finally raises him in the esteem of one of his closest friends, may also be the thing that utterly sinks him as a public figure.
I love that and I hate it. I love it because it’s a marriage of true, hard-fought change emerging, with the attendant costs that make it earned. And I hate it because however Biscuits may caricature the picture in places, the one she sketches of BoJack is accurate, and it’s hard to look at, for BoJack and for us, however much he’s earned this comeuppance with bad decisions past and recent.
I don't know how to feel. Mixed feelings on the finale for me. Not great, not terrible. Was it perfect? No. Am I completely satisfied? No. Are there many loose ends that I will never understand? Absolutely. Can you ever please your whole audience? No.
Dorothy got her closure and was finally able to grieve. Her knowing that Leanne brought Jericho back for almost a year helped the sting of finally waking up. So yes, the “reborn” doll technically helped. Leanne got her closure as well. She got the mother figure that she had long yearned for. Dorothy and Sean get a fresh start. They no longer have to live in the house where they experienced so much trauma. Also, Dorothy seems to have fully recovered from her broken back, she was barely able to walk 2 episodes ago, now she's running up and down stairs.
Kind of felt the Leanne and Dorothy changes of heart were too quick from previous episodes. Leeanne's "redemption" wasn't earned - her character development was all over the place this season. She went from being lowkey evil to straight up psycho in the span of one episode. Then after a single stiff conversation with Dorothy she’s willing to sacrifice herself.
I’m glad that they didn’t kill Julien and acknowledged that Leanne brought him back to life. Julian honestly getting the biggest twist? Julian getting the final frame of the show. Julian getting the final line of the show. I didn't see the twist with the cop and Julian coming though, and it definitely leaves a spinoff open.
That being said, I am disappointed that there were no answers to any of the lingering questions throughout the series such as time inconsistencies, the green window, the history of the house, how Dorothy's mother died, etc. Some of these details set the tone for the show but I was hoping that they would play a more essential role in the final episode.
All in all, I was never expecting a huge twist and always thought what we saw was what we were getting at the end. Also, I didn’t need to dig deep and analyze windows. Is the ending really good? It was fine. And honestly I didn’t expect much. Some have over-analyzed every scene thinking everything has a special meaning. And when it doesn’t fit their expectations they get upset and sat it wasn’t worth it, went on too long, etc. But one thing is for sure though - the show went on for too long. Servant really needed to be a limited series
[7.6/10] Hey! An actually good first season episode of the show! Full disclosure, I’m probably overrating this one a bit because it’s the first episode of the series that really felt like even a nascent version of what Parks and Rec would become.
You have Leslie being well-meaning and sympathetic. Her desire to break into the “boys club,” the outsized importance she places on this, and her endearing awkwardness trying to make it work is all quite sweet and well done. (Heck, even Mark seems kind of charming here with the way he’s nice to her.) On the other end of the spectrum, Leslie being so repentant and scrupulous about breaking into that gift basket is pure Knope, especially in her series of videotaped apologies to the people she let down. Classic stuff.
Plus, we get our first great Ron-Leslie moment. Ron standing up for Leslie in her hearing with the City Manager is a great moment, that fits Ron’s libertarian sensibilities and shows the first bit of recognition for Leslie’s better qualities. And her stressing over a letter in her file, with Mark telling her it’s the thing that makes her a member of the “club,” is the perfect button.
We even get a B-plot of Andy trying to clean the house (and himself) for Ann, where he seems like the well-meaning goofball P&R fans know and love rather than the more jerky layabout he started off as.
Overall, it’s nice to dive back into the first season and actually come up with an episode like this where you see the seeds for what Parks and Rec would grow into rather than something that feels like an alien adaptation of a show you really like.
I lost count of how many times groups of people with guns happened upon other groups of people with guns in this episode. The episode did feature the return of Daniel, which is a plus, except that a major plot point last season was that he was suffering from dementia, and now in this episode, he's just back as the leader of a group of parents, fresh as a daisy? The writers seemingly tried to explain away his miraculous recover from dementia by having him drink yerba mate for "focus." Seriously?? Call every neurologist in the the country! Fear the Walking Dead has come up with a simple cure for Alzheimer's! :facepalm: The big reveal about PADRE was super lame and underwhelming. Otherwise, the writing in this episode is dreadful and often nonsensical, and the acting is uninspired. At one point, Crane is really worried when his father leaves some binoculars behind. I mean, he's way more worried than anyone on planet earth should ever be about binoculars. So he runs off to find his father and give him the binoculars. His sister asks why he has to take the binoculars to his father, and he says, "Because how will he see what's coming without them?" Dreadful.
It's almost as if everyone involved knows this shit sucks, and they're just trying to get to the finish line at this point.
[9.7/10] Three different characters say the phrase “diamond in the rough” multiple times in the first fifteen minutes of Aladdin. While an age appropriate lesson, you would have to be dozing through most of the movie to miss its moral that a person’s worth comes from what’s inside them, rather from than their appearance or wealth or station in life. Aladdin is a rags to riches story, about a “street rat” whose inner-decency let’s him find love and fortune when he’s finally read to “beeeeee himself.”
But however trite that aesop may seem on the service, this crown jewel of the Disney Renaissance earns every bit of it. You’ll struggle to find a tighter script in all of the Disney Animated Canon. It quickly introduces each of its characters, giving them each struggles and goals; has each make choices that are self-flattering and those that are difficult, and lets the consequences of those choices lead to changes of heart and just deserts for everyone involved.
The meaning of what happens after Aladdin, and Jasmine, and even Jafar each choose to be themselves comes from how much time the film spends on exploring what happens when they try to be someone else.
Because Aladdin is also a story of wanting to control your own destiny, of having the agency and the capability to direct your own life, and about desperate people who feel they have to go great lengths to make that happen. The script underscores the point a little too neatly, but Aladdin and Jasmine each only see the limitations in their own lives and the possibilities in the other’s. The Genie’s central want in the movie is to finally be free. Even Jafar, with his power-hungry plotting, is that idea taken up to eleven -- the ability to throw off any restrictions on the life he wants, whether legal, romantic, or metaphysical.
That makes us care about the characters at the core of the film. Each of them essentially wants the same thing, while wanting very different versions of it, and their quests to get it conflicts and intersects in amusing, heartwarming, and occasionally frightening ways. Beyond the standard “true to yourself” messaging, Aladdin is just a cracking good story about characters with clear wants and wishes that drive the action, create the conflicts, and eventually provide a way through for all of them.
All the while, Disney is also offering the peak of its musical, visual, and comic abilities. Despite only boasting a few songs for a musical, Aladdin is all killer, no filler. From the mood-setting introduction of “Arabian Nights”, to the bombastic fun of “Prince Ali” to the coo-worthy duet of “A Whole New World”, each of the film’s tunes is at risk of getting stuck in your head. And the orchestration itself makes a perfect accompaniment to the scenes, whether it’s to heighten a tense moment in the marketplace or encompass Aladdin’s exaltation after his first kiss with Jasmine.
At the same time, Aladdin is a dazzling film to look at. The film mainly adopts a dusky blue palette for its desert setting, contrasting it with hot reds and oranges and yellows that flash and grab amid that azure landscape. The use of light is tremendous, creating shadows and setting moods as the two young paramours canoodle or the eponymous hero stalks his way through a torch-lit cave. And it’s characters are all expressive and move with an intuitive fluidity that marks a path between believable realism and the fantasy of this tall tale perfectly.
That’s all before you dive into the movie’s stellar action set pieces. Aladdin’s race into and out of the cave blends traditional animation and CGI better than most films released decades later. Little sequences like Abu being stranded amid lava or Aladdin needing to avoid a rolling turret are edited for maximum tension. And the final showdown with Jafar shows such imaginative visual verve, with a rapid-fire array of attempted saves and renewed threats before the street rat’s improvised trick that brings down the villain for good (or at least until the next movie).
But that creativity also extends to the film’s more comic character. Part of why the bits of sappiness or moralizing in Aladdin go down so easy is that at almost every turn, they’re undercut by some thoroughly enjoyable bit of comic relief. The animal sidekick trio of Abu, Iago, and Rajah each have their outstanding comic moments and bits of both exasperation and even pathos in connection with their human friends. The magic carpet is an understandably wordless character who not only fuels some of the movie’s most exciting sequences, but who manages to memorably express emotion and personality with nary a line of dialogue.
That’s all to say nothing of the tour de force performance that Robin Williams, and the stellar team of designers and animators, put in to create The Genie, one of the most stunning and memorable Disney characters of all time. The magical wish-giver is the perfect manifestation of Williams’s manic id style of humor, conjuring his impressions, fostering his rapid-fire wit, and even drilling down into that well of humanity he would put on display in more strictly dramatic roles.
It’s telling that The Genie doesn't show up until nearly half an hour into the film and yet he is one of its most iconic elements, carrying the humor, the moral, and even the emotion of the piece in the final tally. His and Williams’s presence in Aladdin are a nearly unrivaled achievement when it comes to the Disney Renaissance, and perhaps animated films writ large.
The Genie is, in many ways, Aladdin’s Jiminy Cricket and Blue Fairy rolled into one. He uses Williams’s panache to make Aladdin’s dream of being a prince to woo his princess possible, but he’s also the one trying to steer him toward the right choices beyond the costumes and cons that a little fairy dust can provide. Aladdin believes that there’s more to him than just his shabby clothes and denigrated position, but thinks that it’s the surface level bits of station and presentation that he lacks, rather than the utter decency and kindness that the movie takes pains to show, that will prove it.
His efforts are not academic. He wants to do all this to win the love of his life. As quickly as the film brings Aladdin and Jasmine together, it does a superb job of making them a root-worthy and intuitive likeable couple. There’s an instant rapport, an ability to improvise that brings them together. It’s easy to see them as each offering what the other wants -- the liberation of wealth and position vs. the liberation of no royal restrictions. But there’s also a sense that, as much as these two crazy kids really are from two different worlds, they’re joined not only by that hope for a particular kind of freedom and agency, but also by a desire to see and be seen for something that no amount of gold or titles or legal expectation can provide.
That’s all a little grandiose, but it’s the idea that powers the movie, and makes those moments so memorable and affecting. Jasmine is Disney’s most fully-realized princess yet, who goes after what she wants, rejects what she doesn't want, and cares about more than just her handsome crush. The Genie has weight beyond his uproarious comic asides because he too has hopes and dreams, the realization of which are not only heartwarming, but which come from a choice that marks Aladdin as being true-of-heart in a way that no narration or prophecy ever could. Even Jafar, as rankly evil as he is from the word go, has a fall that’s strengthened by the irony of his quest for unlimited power and freedom leading him to the same unexpected shackles everyone in the film is trying to escape.
That goes double for Aladdin himself, whose journey is as much a personal one as it is ridden with heart-pumping cave escapes and magic-boosted thoroughfare unveilings and international jaunts. He gets what he wants, as all characters must, but only after trying to get it the wrong way and paying the price for it. He stumbles, hurts his friends, out of an understandable insecurity that the truth will only keep him from the liberty and happiness that seem reserved for people with a different pedigree than he can offer. But he sets things right, and is rewarded for it, when he sticks to being the innately good, decent person he truly is.
There are worse lessons to pack in to a family film, particularly when it’s chock full of such memorable characters, melodies, and crowd-pleasing spectacle. There is no wasted second in Aladdin, with each moment perfectly-calibrate to make you laugh, cheer, sigh, or scream. It is the peak of Disney’s 1990s revivification, an endlessly stunning paean to the desire to chart one’s own path in life, and the true-to-oneself characters whose grace and decency earn them the right to that, and to share it with one another.
Played the game couple of times and before playing the game I never thought a story could be so well told like it was in this game. The story was never about the virus, infected etc. For me that was just a backdrop for the character study that was happening in this story. Father dealing with the grief of losing a daughter, being shell of a human being and just surviving for 20 years, not allowing anyone close to his heart until Ellie comes along.
This adaptation, even though spot on the environment, sound design, character clothing etc, is completely missing in that emotional character study department. I don't mind if the show runners along with Neil are changing the story, adding the backstory, moving in different directions etc as long as they give us that same emotional expressions of characters and bring that connection between characters and the audience to the small screens in form of this TV show. These first two episodes completely missed the mark in that department. Ellie, despite being a scared, smart and respectful 14 year old girl in the game, turned into a "always answering questions with smart ass comments", completely disrespectful 14 year old girl in the show. There are tons of other examples about Ellie, Joel and Tess I could write and mention here but I really don't have the energy.
Even though very well done first two episodes from the production point, it completely missed the mark in my view to present these characters and their struggles from the game to TV screens and get the new comers to the story to feel what players felt when playing the game.
The strongest entry since Azkaban, Half-Blood Prince begins to lay the pieces of the backstory that up to now has largely been hinted at. Memories are a key theme of the film and there is a melancholy feel to the story as characters old and young begin to realise that huge changes are imminent. Amidst all the darker threads however, the film also has a lot of fun portraying teenage angst over relationships and the central trio’s refusal to express their feelings. But it’s Harry’s relationship with Dumbledore that is brought to the fore and after fumbling a little with Sirius, here the filmmakers do a wonderful job of showing the respect and affection the two characters have for each other - it helps to have five films behind this, but Gambon is much warmer and caring towards Harry and there is a much stronger bond shown here that ensures the plot developments hit home when they should. This is also the first film to give Tom Felton something more to do than sneer at Harry and it’s great to see Draco develop into something more interesting than a childish foil to the heroes - his bravado unmasked throughout the film in small vignettes that show his uncertainty and fear. The reveal of the identity of the Half Blood Prince feels like an afterthought in many ways but this sets up the prospect of a great finale.
[7.0/10 on a post-classic Simpsons scale] I appreciate the central observation of this one -- the irony that a show devoted to evoking the sense of niceness resulting in a culture of nastiness behind the scenes. But for an episode that’s satirizing Ellen’s fall from grace, it’s surprisingly gloves on about everything.
Krusty is genuinely decent for once, and leaves not because his toxicity is exposed but because he gets a better gig. Nobody’s really called to account for being a jerk, with it written off as a systemic problem rather than a personal one. Normally, I love that sort of thing (hello fellow fans of The Wire!), but it seems odd, coming from people who make TV especially, to absolve the individuals involved from creating that toxic environment and just chalking it up to an inevitable outgrowth of having to come up with ideas and produce television on a weekly basis. The closest we get is Lindsey Nagle, who acts like a jerk to the assistants and deliberately keeps Marge on shifting ground, but even there, the deal feels a little miscalibrated.
The episode also can’t figure out what to do with the rest of the cast during this semi-out-of-character interlude. The bit at the pet store is a yawn. After last week’s episode, the metahumor of Bart not minding Krusty’s format change because he has seven-hundred classic episodes to stream doesn’t have the same punch. And the intervention based humor was tired.
Still, despite those challenges, I appreciate this one as a character story for Marge. Her starting out brimming with ideas and exuding actual nice to her coworkers, only to crumple under the pressure of the job and turning out creatively tapped and as mean as the others before pulling back from the brink is a good arc. I don’t really watch daytime T.V., but the jabs at their soft pleasures landed well enough. And there’s even some solid animation here, from Krusty’s dances to Marge’s nightmare sequence.
All-in-all, this feels like an episode that could have been better with a few more passes, since it touches on some interesting ideas and bits, but can’t quite pull them off to perfection, but still has strong concepts at its core.
[7.5/10] Definitely a classic. I love the humor in this one about how things are so different in the future, from the running gags about people pronouncing things as “ex-mas” and “axe”, to the Professor’s unnecessary nudity, to the crazy but hilarious concept of a killer robot santa claus being on the loose every year. There’s also just the silly, isolated nonsense that Futurama does well, from Hermes’s extended repetition of “Xmas” to the silliness of Fry gradually falling from a big digital clock, to the third act’s riff on a classic O. Henry tale. (And the little swerve with Leela’s axe and the Xmas tree is great!)
But the main story of the episode is good too. I really like how the first two acts are about Fry and Leela each feeling lonely around the holidays, with the two of them finding solace in each other in ways that are still cynical but sweet in that trademark Futurama way, only for the third act to go whole hog into the Santa-bot attack. It plays with holiday tropes while giving them a wry, dystopian bent that really works.
And I also enjoyed the B-story, which is basically just Bender engaging in some of his usual deceit and debauchery, except with a yuletide sheen. Him being a jerk at a soup kitchen or to orphan “Tinny Tim” should be too dark, but it’s just so over the top that it loops back around to being silly.
Overall, a great Xmas outing for the show, with a lot of funny gags and a solid story to support them that plays on traditional holiday themes in an amusing way.
I am incredibly grateful to Game of Thrones for this adventure I have found myself sucked into for some years now. I am grateful for all the emotions it brought me since day one, bitter and sweet alike. I am grateful for all the laughs, all the tears, all the jokes and gags, every single bit of it, I really am grateful and appreciative of it all. It's been just... wonderful.
That said, I am feeling robbed and betrayed right about now. This ending is arguably one of the worst series finales in the history of television and trust me I realize how bold of a statement that is. The terrible violations the characters have suffered this season, the lack of proper resolution to many of the plots and narratives developed over seasons worth of buildup, the seeking of shock value at the expense of quality writing... that and much much more solidified this as an absolute disappointment of a finale, as opposed to the marvel wrap it could've given this cultural phenomenon.
This episode does have its positives, as always the score, acting and cinematography are perfectly performed but I just do not think it's nearly enough to compensate for how lackluster the writing has been, as much as I wish they did. Oh well, sad as it may be, I'll just hold on to the good stuff and hope that GRRM's book, once finished, will tackle the ending in a more coherent, more respectful and more meaningful way. It's been real y'all...
P.S: I'll leave this here lest some people jump me again. This comment is a representation of my own personal opinion, I am entitled to one just as all of you are. If you enjoyed this season and felt this finale delivered what you were looking for then more power to you mate, but that doesn't nullify my opinion nor does it make yours any valid. If you want to discuss or challenge my views, I'd be more than happy to engage you on that basis but if all you have to offer are petty remarks then please keep them to yourself.
[8.4/10] We live in the finite. Everyone reading this has a limited amount of time on this plane of existence. Maybe you believe there’s an eternal paradise waiting on the other end. Maybe you believe in reincarnation. Maybe you believe that we’re simply waves whose essence is returned to the fabric of the universe. Whatever you believe, almost all of us can agree that whatever we have here, our fragile world and fragile bodies, are not built to last.
That is both terrifying and maddening: terrifying because, like Janet, none of us truly knows what’s on the other side, and maddening because there is so much to do and see and experience even in this finite world, and given how few bearimies we have on this mortal coil, most of us will only have the chance to sample a tiny fraction of it.
So The Good Place gives us a fantasy. It’s not a traditional one, of endless bliss or perpetual pleasure or unbridled success. Instead, it imagines an afterlife where there’s time enough to become unquestionably fulfilled, to accomplish all that we could ever want, to step into the bounds of the next life or the next phase of existence or even oblivion at peace. The finale to Michael Schur’s last show, Parks and Recreation, felt like a dose of wish fulfillment, but with this ending, The Good Place blows it out of the water.
Each of our heroes receives the ultimate send-off. By definition, nearly all of them have found ultimate satisfaction, a sense of peacefulness in their existence that makes them okay to leave it, having connected with their loved ones, improved themselves, and accomplished all that they wanted to. If “One Last Ride” seemed to give the denizens of Pawnee everything they’d ever wanted, “Whenever You’re Ready” makes that approach to a series finale nigh-literal for the residents of The Good Place.
And yet, there’s a sense of melancholy to it all, if only because every person who emerges from paradise at peace and ready to leave, has to say goodbye to people who love them. Most folks take it in stride, with little more than an “oh dip” or an “aw shoot”, but there’s still something sad about people who leave loved ones behind, and whom the audience has come to know and love, bidding what is, for all intents and purposes, a final farewell.
But The Good Place finds ways to make that transcendent joy for each of our heroes feel real. Jason...completes a perfect game of Madden (controlling Blake Bortles, no less). He gets loving send-offs from his father and best friend. He enjoys one last routine with his dance crew. He inadvertently lives the life of a monk while trying to find the necklace he made for Janet. It is the combination of the idiotic, the sweet, and the unexpectedly profound, which has characterized Jason.
Tahani learns every skill she dreamed of mastering (including learning wood-working from Ron Swanson and/or Nick Offerman!). She connects with her sister and develops a loving relationship with her parents. And when it’s time to go, she realizes she has more worlds left to conquer and becomes an architect, a fitting destination for someone who was always so good at designing and creating events for the people she cares about. Hers is one of the few stories that continues, and it fits her.
Chidi doesn't have the same sort of list of boxes checked that leads him to the realization that he has nothing more to do. Sure, he’s read all of the difficult books out there and seemingly refined the new afterlife system (with help from the council) to where it’s running smoothly, almost on automatic. But his realization is more from a state of being happy with where everything is, with what he’s experienced.
He has dinner with his best friend and Eleanor’s best friends and has so many times. He’s spent endless blissful days with the love of his (after)life staring at the sunset. His mom kissed Eleanor and left lipstick on her cheek, which Eleanor’s mom wiped off. I love that. I love that it’s something more ineffable for Chidi, a sense of the world in balance from all the bonds he’s forged rather than a list of things he’s done. And I love that he felt that readiness to move on for a long time, but didn’t for Eleanor’s sake.
Look, we’re at the end of the series, and I’m still not 100% on board with Eleanor/Chidi, which is a flaw. But I want to like it. I like the idea of it. And I especially like the idea of someone being at peace, but sacrificing the need to take the next step for the sake of someone they love. The saddest part of this episode is Eleanor doing everything she can to show Chidi that there’s more to do, only to accept that the moral rule in this situation says that her equal and opposite love means letting him go. Chidi’s departure is hard, but his gifts to Eleanor are warm, and almost justify this half-formed love story that’s driven so much of the show.
Unfortunately, no matter how much peace he finds, Michael cannot walk through the door that leads to whatever comes next. So instead, he gets the thing he always wanted -- to become human, or as Eleanor puts it, a real boy. Ted Danson plays the giddiness of this to the hilt, his excitement at doing simple human things, the symbolism of him learning to play a guitar on earth, on taking pleasure in all the mundane annoyances and simple fun and things we meat-sacks take for granted. Each day of humanity is a new discovery for Michael, and there’s something invigorating about that, something heightened by his own delight at not knowing what happens next in the most human of ways.
The one character who gets the least indication of a next step is Janet. We learn that she is Dr. Manhattan, experiencing all of time at once. We see her accept Jason’s passing, hug our departing protagonists, and take steps to make herself just a touch more human to make her time with Jason a little more right. But hers is a story of persistence, of continued growth, in a way that we don’t really have for anyone else.
Along the way, the show checks in with scads of minor characters to wrap things up. We see the other test subjects having made it into The Good Place (or still being tested). We see Doug Forcett deciding to party hard now that he’s in Heaven. We see Shawn secretly enjoy the new status quo, and Vicky go deep into her new role, and The Judge...get into podcasts! As much as this show tries to get the big things right for all of its major characters, it also takes time to wrap up the little things and try not to leave any loose threads from four seasons of drop-ins across the various planes of existence.
That just leaves Eleanor. She takes the longest of any of the soul squad to be ready. She tries, becoming okay with Chidi’s absence. She overcomes her fear of being alone. But most importantly, she does what she’s come to do best -- help people better herself. There’s self-recognition in the way her final great act, the thing that makes her okay with leaving this plane and entering another, is seeing herself in Mindy St. Clair and trying to save her. The story of The Good Place is one of both self-improvement and the drive to help others do the same. Saving Mindy, caring about her, allows Eleanor to do both in one fell swoop.
So she too walks through the door, beautifully rendered as the bend between two trees in a bucolic setting. Her essence scatters through the universe, with one little brilliant speck of her wave, crashing back into Michael’s hands, reminding him of his dear friend, and inspiring him to pass on that love and sincerity back into the world. It is, as trite as it sounds, both an end and a beginning, something circular that returns the good deeds our protagonists have done, the good people they have become, into some type of cycle that helps make the rest of this place a little better.
Moments end. Lives end. T.V. shows end. The Good Place has its cake and eats it too, returning to and twisting key moments like Michael welcoming Eleanor to the afterlife, while cutting an irrevocable path from here through the crash of the wave. It embraces the way that the finite gives our existence a certain type of meaning, whether we have a million bearimies to experience the joys and wonders of the universe, or less than a hundred years to see and do and feel whatever we can. And it sends Team Cockroach home happy, wherever and whatever their new “home” may be.
In that, The Good Place is a marvel, not just because it told a story of ever-changing afterlife shenanigans, not just because it tried to tackle the crux of moral philosophy through an off-the-wall network sitcom, but because it ended a successful show, after only four seasons, by sending each of them into another phase of existence and made it meaningful. There’s a million things to do with our limited time on this planet, but watching The Good Place was an uplifting, amusing, challenging, and above all worthwhile use of those dwindling minutes, even if we’ll never have as many as Eleanor or Chidi, Michael or Tahani, Janet or Jason, or any of the other souls lucky enough to be able to choose how much eternity is enough.
[7.5/10] I wondered to myself, what was the point of those Breaking Bad flashbacks. Sure, it's cool to see Walt and Jesse and the RV and even the flat bottom flask again. But I was ready to write off the trip back to Saul's first meeting with the meth-dealers in season 2 of Breaking Bad as simple fan service.
It took the scene with Mike for me to get it. The point, at least on my read, is a theme that Better Call Saul has hit time and again -- Saul can't leave well enough alone. He won't listen to Mike that this chemistry teacher is a rank amateur who's going to end up with a dark result. And Gene won't listen to Jeff or his friend who warn that it's a bad idea to darken the doorstep of another poor man stricken with cancer.
We know how things end for Saul in Breaking Bad. The choice to throw in with Walter White rather than be satisfied with his rewarding, if not exactly classy law practice ultimately ruins him, and takes away everything he'd achieved in the years before and after the events of this series. The choice to cast aside any moral hesitation and callously rob a dying man of his finances, to push the bounds of the pragmatic given how long it takes between when they dosed the guy and when Gene tries to complete the deed, will almost certainly lead to a similarly bad end.
Yes, it's neat to flashback and see some of the old faces from Breaking Bad again. It's cool to learn that Huell made it out and see Francesca get one last payday. But the takeaway is simple. Saul lost everything. He has no more fortune or empire. The cops are still after him. His former allies are either dead or have moved on. And even Kim, who asked about him, seems to want nothing to do with him anymore, via a tantalizingly opaque phone call between her and Gene.
So left with no other options, Gene makes the same choice that Slippin' Jimmy did over and over again. He goes back to running scams. He can't leave well enough alone. He does it without any joy, because he's not doing this out of pleasure. He's doing it out of desperation, addition, sadness, and loneliness. He is scraping the last bit of thrill from the bottom of the jar, and if his star-crossed visit to Walter White is any indication, it's likely to be the last step in his sad, pitiable, but always avoidable fall from grace.
EDIT: Here's my usual, more fulsome review for anyone who's interested -- https://thespool.net/reviews/tv/tv-recap-better-call-saul-season-6-episode-11/
[9.8/10] It seems like every season, there’s one episode of BoJack Horseman that just floors me, and this may be the best of them all. More than BoJack’s dream sequence in S1, more than his unforgivable act at the end of S2, more than the even the harrowing end for Sarah Lynn in S3, “Time’s Arrow” is a creative, tightly-written, absolutely devastating episode of television that is the crown jewel of Season 4 and possibly the series.
The inventiveness of the structure alone sets the episode apart. It feels of a piece with the likes of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for finding outside the box ways to communicate the idea of dementia and the brain purging and combining and reconstructing dreams and memories into one barely-comprehensible stew. The way that the episode jumps back and forth through time is a superb way to convey the way this story is jumbled up and hard to keep a foothold on for Beatrice.
And that doesn’t even take into account the other amazing visual ways the show communicates the difficulty and incoherence or what Beatrice is experiencing. The way random people lack features or have scratched out faces, the way her mother is depicted only in silhouette with the outline of that scar, the way the images stop and start or blur together at emotional moments all serve to enhance and deepen the experience.
What’s even more impressive is how “Time’s Arrow” tells a story that begins in Beatrice’s youth and ends in the present day, without ever feeling rushed or full of shortcuts. Every event matters, each is a piece of the whole, from a childhood run-in with scarlet fever to her coming out party to an argument about the maid, that convincingly accounts for how the joyful, smart young girl we meet in the Sugarman home turns into the bitter husk of a woman BoJack is putting in a home. It’s an origin story for Beatrice, and a convincing one, but also one of the parental trauma that has filtered its way down from BoJack’s grandparents all the way down to poor Hollyhock.
And my god, the psychological depth of this one! I rag on the show a decent amount for writing its pop psychology on the screen, but holy cow, the layers and layers of dysfunction and reaction and cause and effect here are just staggering. The impact of Beatrice’s father’s cajoling and her mother’s lobotomy on her development as a woman in a society that tried to force her into a role she didn’t want or necessarily fit is striking in where its tendrils reach throughout her development. The idea of rebelling against that, and the way BoJack’s dad fits into that part of her life is incredible. And the story of growing resentment over the years from a couple who once loved each other, or at least imagined they did and then found the reality different than the fantasy is striking and sad.
But that all pales in comparison in how it all of these events come together to explain Beatrice’s fraught, to say the least, relationship to motherhood and children. The climax of the episode, which intersperses scenes of the purging that happens when Beatrice contracts scarlet fever as a child, her giving birth to BoJack, and her helping her husband’s mistress give birth all add up to this complex, harrowing view of what being a mom, what having a child, amounts to in Beatrice’s eyes.
The baby doll that burns in the fire in her childhood room is an end of innocence, a gripping image that ties into Beatrice’s mother’s grief over Crackerjack’s demise and whether and how it’s acceptable to react to such a trauma. The birth of BoJack, for Beatrice, stands as the event that ruined her life. BoJack is forced to absorb the resentments that stem from Beatrice’s pregnancy being the thing that effectively (and societally) forced her to marry BoJack’s father, sending her into a loveless marriage and a life she doesn’t want all because of one night of rebellion she now bitterly regrets. For her, BoJack is an emblem of the life she never got to lead, and he unfairly suffers her abuses because of it, just like Beatrice suffered her own parents’ abuses.
Then there’s the jaw-dropping revelation that Hollyhock is not BoJack’s daughter, but rather, his sister. As telegraphed as Princess Carolyn’s life falling apart felt, this one caught me completely off-guard and it’s a startling, but powerful revelation that fits everything we know so well and yet completely changes the game. It provides the third prong of this pitchfork, the one where Beatrice is forced to help Henrietta, the woman who slept with her husband, avoid the mistake that she herself made, and in the process, tear a baby away from a mother who desperately wants to hold it. It is the culmination of so many inherited and passed down traumas and abuses, the kindness and cruelty unleashed on so many the same way it was unleashed on her, painted in a harrowing phantasmagoria of events through Beatrice’s life.
And yet, in the end, even though BoJack doesn’t know or understand these things, he cannot simply condemn his mother to suffer even if he’s understandably incapable of making peace with her. Such a horrifying series of images and events ends with an act of kindness. BoJack doesn’t understand the cycle of abuse that his mom is as much a part of as he is, but he has enough decency, enough kindness in him to leave Beatrice wrapped in a happy memory.
Like she asked his father to do, like she asked her six-year-old son to do, BoJack tells her a story. It’s a story of a warm, familiar place, of a loving family, of the simple pleasures of home and youth that began to evaporate the moment her brother didn’t return from the war. It’s BoJack’s strongest, possibly final, gift to his mother, to save her from the hellscape of her own mind and return her to that place of peace and tranquility.
More than ever, we understand the forces that conspired to make BoJack the damaged person he is today. It’s just the latest psychological casualty in a war that’s been unwittingly waged by different people across decades. But for such a difficult episode to watch and confront, it ends on a note of hope, that even with all that’s happened, BoJack has the spark of that young, happy girl who sat in her room and read stories, and gives his mother a small piece of kindness to carry with her. There stands BoJack, an individual often failing but at least trying to be better, and out there is Hollyhock, a sweet young woman, who represent the idea that maybe, just as this cycle was built up bit-by-bit, so too may it be dismantled, until that underlying sweetness is all that’s left.
"It's every man's worst nightmare, getting accused of something like that."
"Do you know what every woman's worst nightmares is?"
Promising Young Woman is dark, entertaining and engaging. It’s not flawless, I don't think it's a cinematic masterpiece or anything like that but I really enjoyed it. The film surprised me by how many turns it took, it had me wondering where the story would lead. The tone and genre shifted a little bit too much, which was jarring at times but ultimately made the movie more exciting.
What I liked:
The use of symbolism, colors, music, and framing. The movie is so damn visually pleasing;
Great ensemble cast. Carey Mulligan was absolutely brilliant in every single scene;
I liked that Cassandra is cunning, she is not the typical 'cold sociopath' but rather a vengeful woman completely fed up with masculinity. I also liked that Cassie is not a Mary Sue. You don’t get to see a female character like this so often. Her revenge on Madison was too cruel. Later, she admitted nothing really happened when Madison was drunk, but how can we be sure she wasn’t rape? The film’s logic is that men will always take advantage of drunk women, why would this time be different? I know that hurt people want other people to feel their pain when they believe they were never acknowledged, that’s what the creators of this movie wanted to show;
It's an interesting choice that for once, the main character is not the victim herself, so the movie is based on the depth of a friendship, and loyalty between the bond of women;
The ending, really exhilarating, matched the message of the film. Yes, it’s bitter and cynical, and leaves a bad taste in your mouth. But that’s the point. The twist was pretty brutal and bold, I definitely didn't think they'd go there. At a certain part I thought this was going to turn into a melodrama about Cassie and Ryan's relationship. It seems like some reviewers were expecting Cassandra to be a hero, to literally kill the men who wronged her. People want some movies to be documentaries, not fiction, but just some!! For example, they have absolutely no problem with watching Borat, despite the fact that this is not how Kazakhs behave or even talk (Sacha Cohen’s fake accent is just horrible and wrong), they don't think how the movie would affect Kazaks. BUT according to these people Promising Young Woman should have ended with the main character triumphing and a happy ending, otherwise it would have negative effect on rape victims. One don’t get to dictate people’s politics but surely we can at least expect them to be consistent? You can’t want acting to be a physical representation/stand-in for a belief system when it suits you and don't when it serves your interests.
What I didn’t like:
The comedic tone of the scene following Cassandra’s death and at the wedding is inappropriate. The characters of Joe and Al Monroe are completely cheesy, idiotic, and quite unrealistic. I wanted them to be more serious because this is not a sitcom.
Cassandra is putting herself in a lot of incredibly potentially dangerous situations. How come none of the guys she was trying to deceit didn’t have weapons of any sort, or didn’t get mad that a woman played them?
All in all, the movie is tense, topical, and eye-opening for people who don’t believe victims of sexual harassment.
[9.3/10] People in Better Call Saul are always making plans. It’s one the things that makes this show and its predecessor so engrossing. In between the committed character work and gorgeous desert styling, there’s intertwining schemes that merge together or crash into one another until our heroes and villains are left to pick up the pieces.
“Wexler v. Goodman” gives us this sort of clash of the uber-prepared titans in spades. As the title promises, it gives us Kim’s plan being superseded, against her will, by Saul’s plan. It gives us Lalo’s surprisingly solid plot to sic the DEA on Gus Fring jostled by Lalo suddenly having to deal with Mike’s equal and opposite machinations to get him in trouble with the law over his actions in last season’s finale. And at the same time, it gives us a glimpse into how the personalities of those involved play into things.
Kim’s plan reflects who she is. After coming so close to playing dirty with Kevin and Mesa Verde to secure a win for Mr. Acker, she pulls back and wants to fix everything, even if it means self-sacrifice. After Rich called her out for last week’s skullduggery, she’s had second thoughts. Now, she wants to reach a settlement with Mr. Acker whatever his number is, and pay for any surplus above what Mesa Verde’s willing to cover out of her own pocket. To boot, she apologizes to Rich (for the yelling, not for the scheming), and figures out a way to make that right too.
It’s the classic Kim Wexler play. Come close to complete and total amoral gamesmanship to win, only to have her conscience or fear of getting caught flare up and use those same planning skills to restore the status quo. As the cold open shows, in the end, Kim does the safe thing, the right thing, even if it puts extra strain and burden on her.
She’s just partnered with the wrong guy. Jimmy enjoys the hunt as much as the prize. Sure, he likes to win, something that Kim calls him out for in their closing blow-up. But often it has less to do with his instrumental goal and more the joy he derives from using his gift for grift to come out on top.
That’s the point of his plan to use a pair of sex workers to embarrass Howard Hamlin in public (in front of Clifford Main, no less). Sure, part of Jimmy’s routine is exacting revenge on Howard because it’s not otherwise possible to inflict it on Chuck. But part of it is just a reminder that Saul can’t let a good idea go to waste, even if that idea would hurt people, even if it would mean tricking someone he loves. The scheming itself is too much fun, the rush of victory too great, and the hubris that tells him there’s no scrape Saul Goodman can’t con his way out of (or into), is too inescapable.
So is the well-plotted wrath of Mike Ehrmantraut. Apart from the moral complexities of Kim’s scheme running aground on Jimmy’s, part of the fun and excitement of Better Call Saul is simply the chance to see people do what they do best. Most of Mike’s portion of “Wexler v. Goodman” sees him simply tightening the noose around Lalo, through his knowledges of what strings to pull to bring law enforcement into his adversary’s business.
The one exception to that is his brief conversation with Nacho, who’s framed in a beautiful shot in the lead-up to his meeting with Gus. That sequence establishes a few plot basics. Mike was persuaded by Gus’s speech last week and is in Fring’s employ once more. Nacho answers to Mike now in this double agent game. And Lalo is stepping up his plans to chip away at Gus’s work and business until Don Eladio and company decide he’s not worth the trouble, necessitating Mike’s counterattack.
But it also features the one non-scheme-related moment in that part of the episode. Nacho challenges Mike on the man he’s working for. Mike challenges him back on Mike’s warning about the muck Nacho was stepping into. And yet, despite his characteristically gruff demeanor about the whole thing, he expresses sympathy for Nacho in his grumbly Mike way with just a look and three words: “then we’ll talk.” We know Mike’s fate. We don’t yet know Nacho. But if there’s anyone with the resourcefulness to get Nacho out of the life he was warned off from, it’s the man who gave him that warning.
We see that loud and clear as Mike springs his trap on Lalo. It’s a queasy thrill to see him posing as a private investigator representing the family of the clerk Lalo killed, coaxing a witness into feeding the police another salient detail. It’s fun to see him dress down a low-level rookie at the precinct to get him to unwittingly deliver the report that connects the dots of Lalo’s hit and run for the investigating officers. It’s a joy to see him use a jury-rigged police radio to sic the cops on Lalo once the proper charges and evidence have been properly baited for the investigators. The whole thing is a symphony of scheming.
One of the frustrating things about Lalo’s introduction is that his “leap through the ceiling, kill a civilian, and crash a car” felt weirdly sloppy for this show’s antagonists to get away with. One of the pleasant surprises of this season is Lalo’s thoughtfulness, his attention to Gus’s moves and his sharp plan to put pressure on Fring’s operations. And one of the more satisfying developments on that front is to see Mike bind those two together, bringing Lalo to task for his earlier sloppiness to help short-circuit the Salamanca boss du jour’s bigger, smarter scheme.
Oddly enough, that’s essentially what Jimmy does to Kim in their half of the episode. Kim has a plan. Jimmy thinks he has a better one. So he doesn't care that Kim is waving the white flag, that she doesn't want to unleash their secret weapon on Kevin, or that she doesn't want to put herself at risk with her job or her most important client. More accurately, he cares, but only enough to think he can overcome all these impediments to deliver the outcome he wants and, thinks is what’s best for Kim.
The most revealing and fun part of the episode comes when he lays out his idea for a series of ads to his usual camera crew. The mini-J.J. Abrams shoots him down, telling him it can’t be done in the way that Jimmy wants in the time that he wants it. But Saul Goodman won’t be deterred, even if he has to come up with his own spray-painted green screen, micro-manage every step of the production, and corral a host of community theater actors into a nail salon. No matter what other people say, when Jimmy is in his element, he wants to do things his way, and damn the consequences.
So when it comes time to agree to the settlement that Kim and Jimmy pre-arranged, Jimmy calls an audible, entirely unbeknownst to Kim. Instead of the $45,000 he and Kim agreed on as a settlement figure, Saul shocks the room with a demand for four million dollars. He kicks Kevin Wachtell in the teeth with a disc full of ads that slander Kevin’s father (played by Bob Odenkirk’s former Mr. Show compatriot Jay Johnston!). And he goes nuclear in the exact way that Kim didn’t want before and doesn't want in the moment -- trying to leverage the discovery that the Mesa Verde logo infringes on the copyright to a famous photo taken by an indigenous photographer.
The ploy infuriates Kim. It spurs incredulity and outbursts in the room. But it gets Kevin to deal. He agrees to move the call center, pay Mr. Acker and the photographer, and even make public apologies to each. What’s more, it (theoretically) helps protect Kim, because her reactions of resistance and frustration and anger in the face of Saul’s ploy are genuine, giving her the perfect emotional alibi for Rich’s suspicion that she and Jimmy are in cahoots.
In theory, everybody wins. Kim gets her way and a piece of her soul back with Mr. Acker getting to stay in his house and take the money. An indigenous photographer will receive proper credit and compensation for having her art co-opted by a commercial cowboy. Kim is above suspicion from Rich or anyone else. Kevin is out some cash and a little dignity, but he still gets his call center and an end to this insanity.
But Kim knows Jimmy well enough to know that he didn’t do it for any of that. He did it because he likes to win. He did because he knows he’s good at grifting and likes to ply his trade, his art, wherever he can. And she knows that he doesn't care if he has Kim’s consent to do it. All of these plans and schemes and plots on Better Call Saul are an absolute joyride for the audience, but when Jimmy involves people he cares about in them, people get hurt, and Kim’s seen that close enough second hand to be ready to be done with it.
We see in the flashback to her refusal to get into the car with her drunken mom that Kim knows how to recognize trouble, to recognize someone who knows how to sidestep blame, paper over misdeeds, and try to talk a person they care about into making a bad decision. That flashback suggests that part of Kim’s affections for Jimmy may come from seeing some of her mom in him. But it also tells us that she knows well enough not to get into a car with someone who could make a crazy swerve halfway down the road.
Or does she? The crazy cliffhanger that “Wexler v. Goodman” leaves us with is Kim’s suggestion that she and Jimmy should either break up or...get married. It’s a strange suggestion, one that nevertheless comports with Saul’s statement in Breaking Bad that he’s twice divorced. There’s the sense of Kim as a moth to the flame, occasionally flying just far away from Jimmy to break orbit, or come just close enough to being burned to flutter away, only to keep coming back to his heat.
It’s the opposite of a plan. It’s an impulse, a reaction, a reflex that could bind her to someone, however temporarily, who thinks he can come up with a roadmap out of any jam he gets himself, or her into. Hopefully this one won’t leave Kim, once again, walking home alone and carrying all that weight by herself.
Home Alone is a perfect movie, not in the sense that there is zero room for improvement or it's the greatest artistic achievement in human history, but in that it does what it sets out to do in a nigh-flawless fashion. It is impeccably paced, shot, and edited. It has the right balance of escapist fantasy, relatable family drama, humor, heart, and even slapstick comedy to keep the film lively without making it a piece of fluff. And miraculously, despite a cast full of ringers like Catherine O’Hara and Joe Pesci, the whole thing hinges on the acting talents of a nine-year-old boy who pulls it off with flying colors.
Because as great as O’Hara is as the mother desperate to get back to her son, as amusing as Pesci and Daniel Stern are as a pair of robbers who get more than they bargained for, as hilarious as the inimitable John Candy (who steals the show with less than five minutes of screen time) is as a polka-playing good Samaritan, Home Alone is, first and foremost, a story about Kevin McCallister, and even at that tender age, Culkin (with a huge assist from writer John Hughes and director Chris Columbus) sells that story like a champ.
That’s part of why Home Alone works so perfectly as a family movie that plays with both kids and adults. As a child, the more outsized elements of the story loom large. The iconic scenes of Kevin tormenting his pursuers offer a spate of perfectly deployed slapstick, worthy of Looney Tunes or The Three Stooges and apt to elicit any number of giggles from the younger members of the audience. By the same token, there’s an escapist fantasy for kids in the early part of the film, where Kevin jumps on the bed, eats junk, and “watches rubbish” without anyone being able to tell him otherwise. There is an incredible sense of fun to these scenes, whether it’s the ACME-inspired antics and great physical performances of the “Wet Bandits” or Kevin living out the immediate joy of his wish to be family-free.
But what makes the film more than just an insubstantial flight of fancy is the way it mixes that holiday mirth with enough heft, enough of the downside of that wish and a stealthily nuanced depiction of a young child maturing in both his ability to take care of himself and his understanding of the world.
When we meet Kevin in the film’s frenetic opening sequence, showing an entire household abuzz with cousins and uncles all in a state of pre-travel frenzy, Kevin cannot even pack his own suitcase. There’s recurring jabs from his siblings and cousins that his mom has to do everything for him. Over the course of the film, when pressed into service by being the all to his lonesome, Kevin becomes a surprisingly self-sufficient little boy. When not smothered by a score of other siblings, he shows a surprising resourcefulness, proving himself able to go to the store, do laundry, and even leave out cookies for Santa Claus when the time arrives. This culminates in the cornucopia of traps Kevin sets for the robbers, proving that he is even capable of defending his house from those who would do his family harm.
In the process, Kevin overcomes a number of his fears, which provides another thematic throughline for the film. Chris Columbus and Director of Photography Julio Macat help this part of the story tremendously by the way a series of normal things are made frightening by shooting them from Kevin’s perspective. From the low shot on the furnace in the basement as it seems to taunt and beckon Kevin while he’s doing laundry, to the scene in the store where Old Man Marley is introduced only by his big black boots, seeming to glower down at Kevin from high above, Macat’s camera keeps us inside Kevin’s head, seeing the terror in these otherwise quotidian interactions. That cinches Kevin’s transition when he tells the furnace not to bother – we understand what he’s overcoming.
The heart of the movie, however, comes through in the scene where he conquers his other big fear – his scary looking next door neighbor, whom his brother described as a secret murderer the cops couldn’t catch. When Kevin runs into him at church, he discovers that Marley isn’t some serial ghoul, but rather a kindly old man who offers him a bit of solace and comfort in a time of need.
It’s an incredibly well-written scene, bolstered by the stellar performance of Roberts Blossom as Marley and Culkin playing Kevin at his most precocious and worldly. Blossom sells the utter warmth and humanity of Blossom behind his icy visage. His sitting next to Kevin as a friendly presence, telling a small part of his life story, and speaking to the lad as something approaching an equal provides a big leap for the film’s protagonist. It’s part of that maturation process, the realization that he shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, that he can’t necessarily trust his brother’s accounts, and that the people who seem the most unnerving can be the people you want in your hour of need. In one scene, Old Man Marley goes from being the film’s great threat to being its heart.
And he ties into the other big motif running through the film – an appreciation of one’s family. What could easily be a trite Hallmark card of a message from the movie has real force from the way the lesson is delivered. When Kevin wishes he had no family, the film helps us understand why, putting him in that relatable little kid situation of causing a scene, feeling you were goaded into it, and that nobody takes treats you nicely or appreciates you. And then when his wish comes true, it takes some time to let the audience, and Kevin, revel in his newfound freedom. But it also show’s Kevin slowly but surely realizing that he misses them, and that as much as they drive him nuts sometimes, having them back is what he really wants for Christmas.
That’s why the scene and story of Old Man Marley’s estrangement with his son is so important. It’s center on the idea that the issues Kevin is dealing with – fear, family discontent, loneliness around the holidays – are not unique to him or his tender age, but are universal obstacles that people of all ages confront at various points in their life. It’s a sign of Kevin’s broadening perspective, the way he’s being changed by this experience and learns that it’s possible to love your family even when you’re angry with them.
It’s also his realization that even in those impulsive moments, whether you’re an old man or a little boy, that you make grand declarations about not wanting to be a part of your family anymore, you may soon find yourself regretting it, yearning for the thing you were so ready to give up. Kevin starts to understand this in Home Alone, and it’s why his sincere plea to one of Santa’s “messengers” (who amusingly offers him tic tacs and can’t get his car started) to bring his family back has weight and meaning.
All of this is able to come together so well because so many of the technical, or less showy parts of the film are all done extraordinarily well. John Williams’s score expertly matches the mood of the film at every turn, whether he’s playing yuletide pop classics or an orchestral score that fits a grand escape or moment of tension. The writing has a clockwork quality to it. Hughes’s script accounts for the circumstances in which a nine-year-old would left alone by himself, unable to be contacted by his parents or the authorities in a nicely plausible fashion, and he constructs a series of events in which Kevin believes he wished his family away and then wished them back in a way that is equally convincing for the kid and the viewer.
And the film is shot and edited superbly, with amusing cuts like Kevin calling out for his mother with an immediate smash cut to a roaring airplane, or the frenzied fashion in which the McCallisters are depicted racing through the airport. Every part of this film works in sync, to deliver a visually exciting, narratively sound work that lets its humor, story, and message, land without a hint of friction.
So when we reach the end of the film and see Kevin’s reunion with his family, and Old Man Marley’s reunion with his, both moments feel earned. Chris Columbus tells a nigh-wordless story in the final scene, with O’Hara’s Kate McCallister silently marveling at how great the house looks and Kevin offering an expression of reluctance, one that suggests he might still be holding onto the anger he unleashed at this mother the last time they were face to face, before quickly sliding into a smile and running to embrace her. Their expressions tell the story, of the way both mother and child now see each other differently on this Christmas Day. The same goes for the expression of gratitude, of near-tearful camaraderie, between Kevin and Old Man Marley as Kevin witnesses his new friends’ reunion with a family of his own. Everyone here has grown; everyone has taken chances despite their fears, and come out better for it.
Throughout all of this, Home Alone manages to be cute, sweet, thrilling, funny, sharp, clever, and hopeful. For films set alone the holiday, it’s all too easy to lean into maudlin sentiment or cloying comedy, but Hughes’s and Columbus’s collaboration produced a film that manages to be nimble and amusing from start to finish, with enough meaning and mirth in it to make the story told feel as important as it is small. Home Alone tells the tale of a young man learning that despite his fear, his inexperience, and his familial resentments, he’s ready to take his first step into adulthood, and finds in the process that what he needs most are the people he was afraid of or wanted to wish away.
Wednesday is entertaining casual watching, but not something I'm likely to re-watch. Maybe my hopes were too high with all the big names involved. I was expecting an Addams Family show with a lot of Tim Burton influence but we got a CW teenage drama with Addams Family characters and barely any Burton influence. Jenna Ortega is carrying that show because it is mediocre. It would have been better as a movie. It's very much a Netflix generic show, nothing spectacular. There are definitely good parts to it, but cannot be compared to the classics.
As I said, Jenna Ortega is note perfect as Wednesday. She captured the essence of what the character was all about. However, I found her a bit too "the new girl who's not like the other girls in those YA movies/shows", which annoyed me a lot. A school full of 'outcasts' and everyone but Wednesday acts like your regular high schooler she looks down at. And it feels like the writing started to slip on the second half because Wednesday just going around accusing people made her seem kind of dumb.
Catherine Zeta Jones and Luis Guzman have zero chemistry, and I'm sorry but Luis Guzmán just does not have charm as Gomez. The family, minus Wednesday, is miscast to be fair. Pugsley was there as decoration. Morticia is uninteresting. Genuinely shocking how little effort was put in for the supporting characters vs Wednesday, I have to imagine it was the script and direction. The male characters are especially bland, I got so tired of the back and forth with Xavier and Tyler. It felt like almost all the relationships between characters were told to us and not shown to us. Everything had to happen for the plot but it effected character's development.
A lot of the dialogue lands so flat, "Why do u look so pale?", "Wednesday always looks half dead" - like I get what they're trying to do but it's so on the nose, it doesn't seem organic.
All in all, Wednesday was OK for light watching but I wouldn't set up your expectations too high, it definitely gets better as the show goes on which is a good sign but it doesn't feel so much like an 'Addams' show, and it lacks the screwball charm of the originals. The Addams family as an ensemble unapologetically juxtaposed against normal society seems to work better than yet another gothy, supernatural high school drama. I just feel the need to say that for those who may have been looking for something darker in tone.
