alone in the field reaching up.
May. 18th, 2015 10:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
damkiannaMy media experiences are piling up again, and if I don't post about them, I'd never post about anything! SO.
I realized that despite having had a long post-mortem withidriya IRL, I never actually said anything about the end of Sleepy Hollow's second season. Which is probably partly because—despite said long post-mortem—I still can't actually figure out how I felt about it.
On the one hand, I LOVED the time travel role reversal part of the finale. That was everything that was most awesome about Ichabod and Abbie interacting and allowed them to (literally) get back to everything I was most delighted by when I first watched the pilot. And in a certain sense, I actually am glad the writers managed to wrap up Katrina's storyline, because I feel like they're more comfortable with Ichabod, Abbie, and Jenny, and I'm hoping the third season will be an improvement as a result.
HOWEVER. I'm more disappointed than I can properly express that they couldn't figure out how to be comfortable with Katrina, and that they had to write her off in such a bizarre, unpleasant, weirdly revisionist way. Obviously I don't actually know, but it seems to me as though they just basically never had any real plan for Katrina's character beyond "damsel trapped in limbo"—which is why they fucked around so excruciatingly with her and Abraham, and why, once they finally extracted her from that situation, they couldn't come up with anything to do except turn her evil and kill her.
Which is RIDICULOUS. She was a QUAKER NURSE. There was NEVER any hint prior to the last third or so of the season that witches considered themselves a different species from humans, or that Katrina felt misunderstood by Ichabod in any kind of fundamental way that had to do with him being nonmagical. ??? That was so clearly bullshit, and bullshit they invented just so they could get rid of Katrina instead of actually having to try to figure out how to make her useful, and I'm honestly pretty angry about it, even now. There were so many threads to do with witchery and with Katrina's coven that they never followed up on—Katrina could have taught the team some basic magic, or become Hawley after they wrote Hawley off (who better to take care of and/or evaluate the potential of magical artifacts than a witch?), or, if they still wanted to write her off, they could even have sent her on a road trip to try to locate some other good witches, since the coven in the area isn't around anymore. Having her go dark side was trite and weird and made no actual sense given her character up until that point, and the team killing her was the NOPE cherry on top of the FUCK YOU, SHOW sundae.
So: disappointed. Probably still going to watch S3, because half of the finale reminded me exactly why I like this show so much, but the other half I hated.
All caught up on Forever, and now that it's probably canceled, I guess I'll finally post about it. To be honest, I never thought it was all that good a show, and I actually think it ended in a pretty perfect place; if they don't shop it around for a second season, that's all right with me. Based on the pilot, I was expecting Henry's schtick to be that he tested various murder methods on himself to solve cases, being the only ME in the world who could do so. But they let go of that, for some reason, and settled into Sherlock Holmes Lite—which wasn't terrible, but there's like thirty other shows that have already done that plus an actual show about Sherlock Holmes, so. I think they missed an opportunity to use an angle that hadn't already been done to—ha!—death.
But! The captain and Jo and Lucas and Abe were all great, and the relationships between all of them + Henry were sufficiently charming for me to be charmed. All the stuff withOwen Adam was not in any way why I was watching, but it was creepy, they did a decent job pacing it, and the "solution" Henry came up with was totally fucked up but almost appropriate—what else is there to do, to stop the guy? D: And then they ended with the reveal to Jo, which is what I've been waiting for all season! The only thing I now need is the reveal to Lucas, but I can imagine that on my own. (Henry has a superpower. Lucas would be DELIGHTED.)
I'm much less at peace with the probable cancellation of Battle Creek, which really is almost exactly what I wanted and never got from Almost Human.
The big minus, and the one reason I might be glad it's canceled, is this weird romantic subplot they're doing with Russ and Holly—I could ship it, but they're belaboring how it's all up to Russ in a way I dislike a lot. It's Russ's responsibility to say something, Russ's job to snatch up Holly before some other guy seals the deal; Holly stands around waiting, and if some other guy asks her out before Russ gets around to it, what can she do about it? Russ missed his window. It's not like if she's interested she could ask him out! Or at least absolutely none of the characters seem to be treating that like a possibility, despite the fact that it totally is one. *hands* On the up side, they would only need to do a teeny tiny bit of work to fix this: if Holly had asked Russ out, a lot earlier on in their backstory, and Russ had done his emotion-phobic thing and shut her down cold, THEN I would buy that it actually is up to him to let her know that he wants to give it a try now. (And technically this is still a thing that could be revealed to us in flashbacks in the next few eps, so. I can hope.)
But everything else about it, I am deeply enjoying. The episode withKathy Morningside Russ's mother was SOLID GOLD, that was beautiful. And 1.10 was basically the first chapter of a Russ/Milt fic, in all the best ways: Milt asks Russ to assist on a case! Russ gets kidnapped! Milt kind of loses his shit in a really Milt way! The kidnapper lectures Russ on not appreciating Milt enough. AND THEN Milt busts in and finds Russ AND THEY HUG and then Russ is all emotionally stunted about it. The pacing of their partnership and the mixture of steps forward and back is exactly my speed, so far. I just hope we get enough hints about what's up with Milt to use as a springboard in fic.
I think that's just about everything we're watching on TV right now (except The Flash, but I never have much to say about The Flash. Or Elementary, but for the opposite reason). Which means I can move on to the reason I was actually prompted to make this post: we went to see Mad Max yesterday evening—and when I say "we", I mean me,idriya, and our mother.
IT. WAS. MAGICAL. It had too many explosions foridriya's taste, and too much weird for my mother's, but I LOVED IT. (I think in a way it was kind of like Pacific Rim: if you WANTED to see giant mecha hitting sea monsters with buildings, you got to see a good movie with giant-mecha-hitting-sea-monsters-with-buildings icing, aka a fantastic movie. If you just wanted to see a good movie, you got to see a good movie that went sort of overboard with the giant mecha hitting sea monsters with buildings.)
People much smarter than me have already said all the things about Furiosa, and the Vuvalini (only the one L, people!), and Toast and Capable and Angharad and Dag and Cheedo—look! Look at all those women doing stuff and saving each other!—so I really have almost nothing to add. Some of them died, and the deaths hurt, but because there were SO MANY women, it didn't end up feeling to me like they died because they were women. The camera didn't treat their deaths any differently, didn't linger on their tragic beautiful bodies or whatever; they just died, because a lot of fucked-up stuff was happening and EVERYBODY was dying right and left.
I came out of that movie a) wanting some kind of weird platonic Max&Furiosa soulbond fic (the way they passed guns to each other! He was her SNIPER STAND! I JUST WANT THEM TO EXCHANGE SIGNIFICANT LOOKS, SAY TWO WORDS A DAY, AND BLEED ON EACH OTHER, OKAY) and b) with a half-formed headcanon that this was a Snow White and the Huntsman AU. Well, and also with a ridiculous grin on my face, because THAT WAS AWESOME. :DDDDDDDDDDDD
And now I should actually do some work! (Oh, and I suppose I should say: outlines for Book Three of ItO now perhaps three-quarters wrangled, and I'm about 5k into Chapter 1. God knows how long it'll be, but I'm working on it.)
I realized that despite having had a long post-mortem with
idriya IRL, I never actually said anything about the end of Sleepy Hollow's second season. Which is probably partly because—despite said long post-mortem—I still can't actually figure out how I felt about it.On the one hand, I LOVED the time travel role reversal part of the finale. That was everything that was most awesome about Ichabod and Abbie interacting and allowed them to (literally) get back to everything I was most delighted by when I first watched the pilot. And in a certain sense, I actually am glad the writers managed to wrap up Katrina's storyline, because I feel like they're more comfortable with Ichabod, Abbie, and Jenny, and I'm hoping the third season will be an improvement as a result.
HOWEVER. I'm more disappointed than I can properly express that they couldn't figure out how to be comfortable with Katrina, and that they had to write her off in such a bizarre, unpleasant, weirdly revisionist way. Obviously I don't actually know, but it seems to me as though they just basically never had any real plan for Katrina's character beyond "damsel trapped in limbo"—which is why they fucked around so excruciatingly with her and Abraham, and why, once they finally extracted her from that situation, they couldn't come up with anything to do except turn her evil and kill her.
Which is RIDICULOUS. She was a QUAKER NURSE. There was NEVER any hint prior to the last third or so of the season that witches considered themselves a different species from humans, or that Katrina felt misunderstood by Ichabod in any kind of fundamental way that had to do with him being nonmagical. ??? That was so clearly bullshit, and bullshit they invented just so they could get rid of Katrina instead of actually having to try to figure out how to make her useful, and I'm honestly pretty angry about it, even now. There were so many threads to do with witchery and with Katrina's coven that they never followed up on—Katrina could have taught the team some basic magic, or become Hawley after they wrote Hawley off (who better to take care of and/or evaluate the potential of magical artifacts than a witch?), or, if they still wanted to write her off, they could even have sent her on a road trip to try to locate some other good witches, since the coven in the area isn't around anymore. Having her go dark side was trite and weird and made no actual sense given her character up until that point, and the team killing her was the NOPE cherry on top of the FUCK YOU, SHOW sundae.
So: disappointed. Probably still going to watch S3, because half of the finale reminded me exactly why I like this show so much, but the other half I hated.
All caught up on Forever, and now that it's probably canceled, I guess I'll finally post about it. To be honest, I never thought it was all that good a show, and I actually think it ended in a pretty perfect place; if they don't shop it around for a second season, that's all right with me. Based on the pilot, I was expecting Henry's schtick to be that he tested various murder methods on himself to solve cases, being the only ME in the world who could do so. But they let go of that, for some reason, and settled into Sherlock Holmes Lite—which wasn't terrible, but there's like thirty other shows that have already done that plus an actual show about Sherlock Holmes, so. I think they missed an opportunity to use an angle that hadn't already been done to—ha!—death.
But! The captain and Jo and Lucas and Abe were all great, and the relationships between all of them + Henry were sufficiently charming for me to be charmed. All the stuff with
I'm much less at peace with the probable cancellation of Battle Creek, which really is almost exactly what I wanted and never got from Almost Human.
The big minus, and the one reason I might be glad it's canceled, is this weird romantic subplot they're doing with Russ and Holly—I could ship it, but they're belaboring how it's all up to Russ in a way I dislike a lot. It's Russ's responsibility to say something, Russ's job to snatch up Holly before some other guy seals the deal; Holly stands around waiting, and if some other guy asks her out before Russ gets around to it, what can she do about it? Russ missed his window. It's not like if she's interested she could ask him out! Or at least absolutely none of the characters seem to be treating that like a possibility, despite the fact that it totally is one. *hands* On the up side, they would only need to do a teeny tiny bit of work to fix this: if Holly had asked Russ out, a lot earlier on in their backstory, and Russ had done his emotion-phobic thing and shut her down cold, THEN I would buy that it actually is up to him to let her know that he wants to give it a try now. (And technically this is still a thing that could be revealed to us in flashbacks in the next few eps, so. I can hope.)
But everything else about it, I am deeply enjoying. The episode with
I think that's just about everything we're watching on TV right now (except The Flash, but I never have much to say about The Flash. Or Elementary, but for the opposite reason). Which means I can move on to the reason I was actually prompted to make this post: we went to see Mad Max yesterday evening—and when I say "we", I mean me,
idriya, and our mother.IT. WAS. MAGICAL. It had too many explosions for
idriya's taste, and too much weird for my mother's, but I LOVED IT. (I think in a way it was kind of like Pacific Rim: if you WANTED to see giant mecha hitting sea monsters with buildings, you got to see a good movie with giant-mecha-hitting-sea-monsters-with-buildings icing, aka a fantastic movie. If you just wanted to see a good movie, you got to see a good movie that went sort of overboard with the giant mecha hitting sea monsters with buildings.)People much smarter than me have already said all the things about Furiosa, and the Vuvalini (only the one L, people!), and Toast and Capable and Angharad and Dag and Cheedo—look! Look at all those women doing stuff and saving each other!—so I really have almost nothing to add. Some of them died, and the deaths hurt, but because there were SO MANY women, it didn't end up feeling to me like they died because they were women. The camera didn't treat their deaths any differently, didn't linger on their tragic beautiful bodies or whatever; they just died, because a lot of fucked-up stuff was happening and EVERYBODY was dying right and left.
I came out of that movie a) wanting some kind of weird platonic Max&Furiosa soulbond fic (the way they passed guns to each other! He was her SNIPER STAND! I JUST WANT THEM TO EXCHANGE SIGNIFICANT LOOKS, SAY TWO WORDS A DAY, AND BLEED ON EACH OTHER, OKAY) and b) with a half-formed headcanon that this was a Snow White and the Huntsman AU. Well, and also with a ridiculous grin on my face, because THAT WAS AWESOME. :DDDDDDDDDDDD
And now I should actually do some work! (Oh, and I suppose I should say: outlines for Book Three of ItO now perhaps three-quarters wrangled, and I'm about 5k into Chapter 1. God knows how long it'll be, but I'm working on it.)
