#alpha's watchlog

[fatalism-and-villainy]

I finished my rewatch of Voyager a few days ago (finale was just as bad as I remembered and then some) and I'm going to be moving on to Enterprise. Unlike TNG, DS9, and Voyager, which I'd seen at least some of before (though last fall was my first time watching TNG all the way through) I've never watched any of Enterprise, and I'm considering liveblogging it on here. I don't make many off-the-cuff posts anymore, and maybe this'll help me get back in the spirit of blogging.

[fatalism-and-villainy]

Watching Crazy Rich Asians for some light-hearted fun during this migraine and did this guy just keep his girlfriend in the dark about being rich even up until meeting his family overseas..... wtf

[fatalism-and-villainy]

I’m not against miscommunication as a plot device - especially because that can refer to a pretty vast array of things - but I cannot stand that trope where a character is trying to express or explain themself, but is having trouble spitting it out or putting it in words, and then the other person immediately jumps in and interrupts them with a big honking assumption about what they’re trying to say, and just runs off to act on that assumption without giving the other person a chance to correct them. Just makes me want to tear my hair out

[fatalism-and-villainy]

I'm watching the new Knives Out movie and I'm sorry but it's soooooo dumb

[fatalism-and-villainy]

1899 spoilers -

Hmm, yeah, this show was a bit disappointing. Engaging enough in its mystery box twists and turns that I wanted to keep watching, but a bit lacking in concept and follow through.

I really like a good simulated reality plot! I'm a big fan of a Philip K. Dick style plot. But in this case.... I honestly think it was one of the least interesting possible explanations for what was happening? I was initially leaning towards purgatory, given the way most of these people had a troubled past in which they killed someone or did something otherwise morally questionable, or else something like an alternate dimension, given the triangle imagery and the way it recalled the Bermuda triangle. Simulation - and especially the reveal that they're on a spaceship called the Prometheus - just felt kind of rote as far as sci fi twists go.

And the thing that Odar and Friese did really well with Dark was put a fresh twist on a familiar sci fi concept - in that case, time travel. In that show, the stable time loop, and the notion of making something happen via trying to prevent it from happening, perpetuating the loop while trying to break it, were imagined as a cycle of trauma that the character were trapped in. It dug into the emotional ramifications of that scenario, and gestured at philosophically engaging questions, like the nature of free will, as well as entirely mundane themes, like growing up to be the worst iteration of yourself, despite all attempts to do otherwise.

But here, the philosophical inquiry that they mined from the simulation scenario was.... kind of the definition of fake-deep, like with Daniel's overly sentimental and content-less line about how reality isn't about what's inside our minds, but what's outside of us. Otherwise, I felt like Odar and Friese were retreading a lot of the same territory they covered in Dark, and in a way that didn't fit as well with the premise of this show. Once again, we had characters stuck in a perpetuating loop - this is why the purgatory theory would have worked so well! - but the emotional effects of that don't come through for the viewer on a storytelling level, because we only get the barest hints of the repetitive nature of the events. In Dark, having multiple perspectives from different versions of each character really made me feel the oppressive weight of the time loop cycles, but here that aspect was underutilized. I think part of what makes a simulated reality scenario effective is actually showing the multiple loops, leaning into the uncanny effect of seeing the same scenes starting to happen again, feeling the pain of one of the characters not remembering the emotional development they've gone through before. Devoting an entire season to just one loop was a waste, in my opinion, especially since the early episodes were so slow - restarting things partway through would have been more effective, I think.

Like Dark, this show also gestured towards people's emotional tendencies keeping them trapped in the same loops over and over, but I think that sentiment in Dark - that we can't escape our fate because we can't escape our desires - landed much better and felt more earned. Here, it's unclear exactly what the constraints for the simulation scenario, and the desired outcome, were supposed to be, so it's hard to understand exactly how this concept comes to play. Again, this is why showing multiple loops would have worked better.

(It's possible that they're going to expand more on the emotional stakes in this way in later seasons, as certainly worldbuilding and character motivations will be revealed more, and the finale implies there's a lot we still don't know. But.... as a season in and of itself, I'm a bit under-satisfied with a finale that effectively undoes the characterization and emotional context we've had built up for us all season.)

Also, to be honest, I just found the protagonist kind of dull. And the reveal that the emotional centre of her motivations was her child.... yeah, kind of a cliché.

[fatalism-and-villainy]

We watched 300 last night and my thoughts are a) The way that a legendary story from the ancient world got reinterpreted as blatant War on Terror era American militarist propaganda is kind of interesting from a historiographic and adaptation theory perspective, but also pretty ideologically repulsive, b) the movie is unfortunately still pretty enjoyable given the unintentionally campy ridiculousness of it all, and c) it's actually a pretty visually interesting film - despite all the silly slo-mo, the colouring and composition of the shots is surprisingly unique and engaging for a mainstream hypermasculine 2000s era media product

[fatalism-and-villainy]

We watched Midsommar tonight and like. holy fuck. It was actually kind of incredible - the editing and transitions were so sharp, the use of colour and mirrors in the visuals was so stunning, and the soundtrack was perfect. It was also incredibly disturbing - like, the more I think about it, the more things come to mind to be disturbed about! I'd recommend it but god damn

[fatalism-and-villainy]

I feel like I’m the only person on earth who didn’t love Everything Everywhere All at Once