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TV: The Golden Era Reborn

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Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

Mike rules. And I agree with the "rooting for the bad guy" sentiment. I found that in SOA, also, since there is not ONE redeemable character in that show. They are ALL bad, in some form.
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

Finished BB (second viewing) on Saturday doing the last 4 that night.

Dang, forgot how intense the 3rd from the end is. And then they slam on the brakes with the penultimate before the fan service of the ending.

I was pulling for Walt the first time through, but knowing the collateral damage of how it all ends made him tougher to take this time. Still one of the better character arcs of all time. Love how he cops to his real motivation in the end.

Gonna do the second half of last season's Saul to get ready for next week.


Anybody still watching TWD?

I'm so bored with that show and last night was more of the same. Utterly predictable.

I have so much invested that I keep at it, but next season better grab me right away or I'm gone.
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

Do any of you guys watch American Experience on PBS? My company is the primary corporate sponsor and as such, we get some cool opportunities like today. Their big film for the year is The Great War, about WW1. We had the producer and one of the historians come into the office today and we saw a 45-minute section. It's going to be a 3-night miniseries starting on April 10th. Fascinating material. I highly recommend you all check it out. I'm not usually one for documentaries, but this one was pretty cool.
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

I think everybody assumed Review was going to end with Forrest McNeil dying in some fashion, and in typical Review fashion, they managed to make it even darker. It's a shame the third season only got three episodes, but I'm glad they at least got something to wrap it up properly. Some day that show is going to end up on a streaming site and become a huge hit.
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

Do any of you guys watch American Experience on PBS? My company is the primary corporate sponsor and as such, we get some cool opportunities like today. Their big film for the year is The Great War, about WW1. We had the producer and one of the historians come into the office today and we saw a 45-minute section. It's going to be a 3-night miniseries starting on April 10th. Fascinating material. I highly recommend you all check it out. I'm not usually one for documentaries, but this one was pretty cool.

It's usually hard to go wrong with American Experience, and a multi-parter sounds even better!
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

Wow. Big Little Lies was a great series.

I wish it had more coming.
I enjoyed it as well. I really liked the soundtrack, for some reason.

That said, I don't know that I'd want it to continue. I'm not sure where they would go with it, beyond just turning it into a soap opera with shifting alliances, affairs, etc... Apparently the director isn't keen on the idea, but money usually talks.
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

Legion episode 7 was fantastic. I've been holding off on episode 8 for a night when I'm not exhausted, because that show takes concentration.

The writer best get an Emmy is what I'm saying. The director deserves one too.
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

Finished BB (second viewing) on Saturday doing the last 4 that night.

Dang, forgot how intense the 3rd from the end is. And then they slam on the brakes with the penultimate before the fan service of the ending.

I was pulling for Walt the first time through, but knowing the collateral damage of how it all ends made him tougher to take this time. Still one of the better character arcs of all time. Love how he cops to his real motivation in the end.

Gonna do the second half of last season's Saul to get ready for next week.


Anybody still watching TWD?

I'm so bored with that show and last night was more of the same. Utterly predictable.

I have so much invested that I keep at it, but next season better grab me right away or I'm gone.

I usually binge TWD at the end of each season so I don't have to deal with the annoying cliffhangers. Most of the time it's really not that enjoyable, but I keep watching hoping something will happen.

I may go back and watch BB soon, or at least the pilot. I started watching the series on Netflix and knew I was in for the long haul after that first scene.
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

I enjoyed it as well. I really liked the soundtrack, for some reason.

That said, I don't know that I'd want it to continue. I'm not sure where they would go with it, beyond just turning it into a soap opera with shifting alliances, affairs, etc... Apparently the director isn't keen on the idea, but money usually talks.

I'm with you on 100% of what you wrote.

But there's hope. It was a lot of big names and it was based on a book. So the cost would be extremely costly to cast it again and it would require totally original writing. Neither are easy hurdles to overcome.
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

Legion episode 7 was fantastic. I've been holding off on episode 8 for a night when I'm not exhausted, because that show takes concentration.

The writer best get an Emmy is what I'm saying. The director deserves one too.

I've seen them all. 5, 6, and 7 were some of the best episodes of TV I've seen.

I want to say something about the finale but I'll wait.

The writing has been astonishingly good.
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

I've seen them all. 5, 6, and 7 were some of the best episodes of TV I've seen.

I want to say something about the finale but I'll wait.

The writing has been astonishingly good.

Depending on Dr. Mrs. I'll probably see episode 8 tonight and then get with the spoiler text.
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

The final season of Black Sails was not particularly impressive for the most part, but the last three or four episodes tied it up in a very satisfactory way. We find out how the treasure got to Treasure Island in the first place, and what fate befell Captain Flint(not what you would have expected). The only issue I have is that it's not Ben Gunn who gets marooned on the island for 20 years.

Watching these last few episodes has me wanting to re-read Treasure Island, which I probably haven't read since I was 12 years old.
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

Anybody still watching TWD?

I'm so bored with that show and last night was more of the same. Utterly predictable.

I have so much invested that I keep at it, but next season better grab me right away or I'm gone.

I agree. I start watching episodes at 2x or 3x on the DVR and only slow it down for things that look interesting. The scene where Negan showed up and a few scenes foreshadowing what happened there were about it. Watched it in about 20 minutes. I may just start reading episode recaps next season to see if it's worth it anymore because it sure seems like it may not be.
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

I agree. I start watching episodes at 2x or 3x on the DVR and only slow it down for things that look interesting. The scene where Negan showed up and a few scenes foreshadowing what happened there were about it. Watched it in about 20 minutes. I may just start reading episode recaps next season to see if it's worth it anymore because it sure seems like it may not be.

My wife and I gave up on it too. I lost interest last season, and she made it about 2 episodes into this season before she said enough.
 
Re: TV: The Golden Era Reborn

OK. I finished the first season of Legion (episodes 1-8). Overall I loved the show. Spoilers etc to follow:

PART ONE: EPISODE 8

First off, a question. Syd kisses David/Farouk so they swap consciousness/bodies. Syd goes to David's body while David/Farouk is in Syd's body. The last time this happened Syd felt David's mutant powers, so his mutant powers are corporeal, not mental. However, Farouk takes control of Syd's body and immediately plays the "bucket chain" with the other characters, so Syd's mutant powers are mental, nor corporeal. Is this an inconsistency with anything we've learned before?

For that matter, when Farouk is freed of the Halo it should immediately overwrite David causing David's consciousness to cease to exist, but it doesn't. Is this because Farouk only "knows the ropes" of the insides of David's (corporeal) brain and now it's in Syd's, so it can't pull that trick off? I thought that the David/Farouk tug of war was going on entirely inside David's (mental) mind, not his brain, in which case David's mind would be intact and familiar to Farouk regardless of the body. Or perhaps Farouk isn't in control long enough to destroy David's consciousness? It seems to have had no trouble at least sending Oliver's consciousness away -- although it's possible Oliver's consciousness managed to escape to the ice cube in the astral plane* where Farouk can't get at it.

*Do we know for certain that the astral plane exists outside David's mind? It seems to since Oliver was there and Oliver seems to be an independent being and not part of David's fragmented personality. At least, he is if we accept that Syd and Melanie are also independent beings. For now I'm dismissing the possibility that everything is a product of David's imagination, or that David is also part of the fragmented personality of Drooling Guy, because those are not falsifiable hypotheses.

OK, back to Farouk's escape. When the dust settles everybody wakes up in his or her own body except poor Oliver. Even Dead Lenny?!** Everybody was for a brief moment in other bodies. If I remember the sequence:

Syd: Syd --> David forces David: David --> Syd
Farouk: Syd --> Kerry forces Kerry: Kerry --> Syd
Farouk (Kerry) knocks out Cary, Ptonomy, Melanie, and Harvey Dent Guy without switching
Farouk (Kerry) and David do their little Xanadu dance number, resulting unintentionally in Farouk possessing Oliver.

I'm assuming that just like last time eventually the flipping "wears off" so all the unconscious characters can wake up with their normal consciousness restored. Further I'm assuming this doesn't apply to Farouk since otherwise he'd just slingshot right back into David's head.

But listen. At the moment when they are unconscious and still in each other's bodies, Syd should be in David's body and Kerry should be in Syd's body, but... WHERE IS DAVID? If Farouk didn't just take over but escaped him when he slipped out from under the halo, then David should be in Syd's body, but when Farouk jumped from Syd's body to Kerry's body Kerry also went into Syd's body. (1) Is that a problem? (2) OK, say it isn't -- say multiple mentalities can occupy a body. That's what the whole stupid show is about, right? In that case what does that say about the difference between independent beings with real bodies and David's Legion -- the multiple parts of his fragmented personality?

** OK, Dead Lenny. At the end there she is appearing to Farouk in Oliver's body. Dead Lenny is an aspect of Farouk, like Tumor Ted Cruz or Mr. Met Hitler. We were told that King was Farouk's editing back of himself in David's memory. So does Farouk just keep his "Legion" around for laughs, or is Farouk like David a composite character? Have we ever seen any of the faces of the Shadow King show independent motivation or perception or are they all interchangeable masks?

PART TWO: THE WHOLE SHOW

And that finally is where I wanted to wind up. As I went through the show I used as a working assumption that the following characters were all inside David's head: David, Cary-Kerry, Farouk. In turn, all of these characters may actually be one level deeper in Drooling Guy's head, but the distinction doesn't matter.

Farouk contains its own Legion, manifesting sometimes as Tumor Ted Cruz, Mr. Met Hitler, King, The Disembodied Eyes, or Dead Lenny.

In addition, there are these assumed independent characters: Melanie, Ptonomy (I guess?), Oliver; Live Lenny, Sis, Doomed Therapist; Syd, Drooling Guy; Bad Hair Guy, Harvey Dent Guy and all his redshirts.

First Theory: everything is as it seems at the end of the first season. If so, then all the issues above are either problems or teasers. I'm OK with it, although I wish they hadn't resolved David's dilemma so cleanly and I'm disappointed with ep 8 after being blown away by ep 7.

Second Theory: Drooling Guy is the second level of Legion, and Drooling Guy has David as his primary personality, but has also invented Clockworks and all the Clockworks people. The two dominant halves of Drooling Guy's consciousness are David and Syd. He actually has the mutant powers -- either both sets of their powers or something else entirely.

Third Theory: Division 3 and the Super Friends are both projections of David's mind. We have no idea which characters are real and which are portions of his fragmentary consciousness. It's entirely possible that all the characters are real and David is sometimes interacting with them as real and sometimes within his mindscape. Lenny is the obvious example, but maybe every character has a Lennylike dual existence. The key to this theory is that while we all understand the spacial dimensions in this semi-real, semi-projected world are unreliable, maybe the temporal dimensions are too. The show plays with memories being created, erased, repurposed, with characters used as symbols like literals dropped into code. Maybe David's real power is that he can continually recode his mind. The IDE where he does this is the projected space where we have seen most (maybe all) of the action so far.

Corollary: Farouk can also rewire David's memories, so david and Farouk are playing one of those computer camp glass bead games where two kids alternate overwriting each other's code to create a dead end -- a smart person's version of Reversi. Liquid time means none of the timeline in the first season has to be real and we may be anywhere along it "for real." We may still be frozen at the moment of the gunshots, or at the moment where David and Syd "kiss" (the merging of two disparate personality halves) or in an "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" suspension of the moment when David (actually) hangs himself (note: the character in that story, Farquhar, sounds like "Farouk.")


I want to hang on to the ambiguity of the situation so I'm content to keep spinning out theories. Since Legion is based on Marvel canon I'm sure most if not all these ideas can be easily dismissed. But personally I want to keep on watching this show and not worry about what it is an adaptation of. At least for now.
 
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