Catching up
We caught Thursday’s The Great North Sunday night, with “MIB: Men in Belts Adventure.” The rest of the family does not want to join Beef on his boring hobbies like “watching a new construction groundbreaking,” so he goes alone, and runs into Walt. (He’s the father of Judy’s friend Kima.) They bond over their shared interests and strike up a new best friendship (in a montage scored to “Can’t Fight This Feeling,” a very funny choice).
There are some pretty funny details – Beef and Walt both having coffee mugs specifically for groundbreakings (“I Dig Coffee”) and (“Must Love Digs”). The kids are all happy with this because they get to spend more time together and not indulging their dads’ boring interests. But then Beef’s favorite belt goes missing, and he discovers it in Walt’s closet… and the kids have to get the two to work things out and patch up their feud.
Meanwhile, Wolf and Honeybee team up with the Tuntleys to take down a couple that scams the other couples in Lone Moose out of a free dinner (by pretending to take their card out to split the check but letting the other couple pay, saying “we’ll get the next one,” then never getting the next one). They fail to get their revenge– if you’re familiar with Wolf’s competence at literally anything, this is not a surprise– but they do succeed at finding a new friend couple to hang out with: each other! Aww. Pretty good episode all in all, although I mostly enjoyed the A-plot. (Wolf does get a good line complaining about the scammer couple: “They even had more drinks than me, and that is very hard to do.”)
In other favorite lines, the kids’ blowoff excuses to Beef for not going to the groundbreaking at the beginning. Moon: “Ham and I have been cast in the new Mission: Impossible.” Ham: “Yup. I play… the mission.” Moon: “That’s right. And I play Tom… Cruise.”
“Sorry, Dad. Maybe you can find someone else that’s into the boring stuff you’re into.”
“Yeah! Like… I don’t know, maybe some kind of colonial ghost.”
Old Favorites
Watched the first five episodes of Detroiters this week before going on vacation. Still a great show, even in these early episodes. (They’re not the best the show did, but there isn’t a bad one in the bunch, and we get Ned’s insane pitches in “Hog Riders,” plus “Sam the Man,” which is very much in the tone of the show at its best. “Devereux Wigs” is a weird fun time– and one of the show’s plots most blatantly based on a real Detroit-area commercial— with a guest turn from Mr. George Wallace himself!) It’s on Netflix and Paramount+ as well; if you somehow haven’t seen it, you have no excuses.
We also found out that Royal Crackers was now on Hulu. And while there’s been no information on a season 3 one way or the other (and the delay in any decision certainly isn’t promising), this is a really terrific underseen little gem of a show. We ended up watching “Casa de Darby” and “Craftopia,” episodes focused on Darby and Matt, who generally get less time than Stebe, Theo Jr., and Deb. Look, I’ll tell you right now, the pilot isn’t that great, it still seems like too much of a Succession parody, and it has some of that [adult swim] abrasiveness, but the show quickly blossoms into its own thing, which is incredibly hilarious at its comedic peak and genuinely moving at its dramatic peak. Anyway, maybe if you get your streaming eyeballs on it, it’ll increase its chances for a pickup. Do it anyway because you’ll be better off for it.
Coming Up
I’ve mentioned It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia returns July 9, but now we have a trailer!
And possibly more importantly in the world of trailers for comedies returning July 9, we also got a trailer and confirmed release date for season 2 of Digman!! (The first exclamation point is part of the title; the second represents my own excitement.)
What’s new?
I’ve been out of town since Wednesday, so I’ve had no chance to watch anything new.
The BBY2 arc on Andor, written by Dan Gilroy and written by Janus Metz, is about as satisfying as this show gets. There is, compared to the first two arcs of the season, a strong focus, with the story revolving about Imperial plans for Ghorman, and Cassian being sent there to finally kill Dedra but instead bearing witness to a massacre, while Mon Mothma reaches a turning point in the aftermath. There is a bit of a side trip in part one where a “Force healer” tells Cassian he’s got a destiny, but really everything moves incredibly well from point A to point B to point C. And the middle part, “Who Are You?” is an incredible, propulsive, and tragic episode where the poor Ghor are guided into riot and ruin by the Empire, and where Syril, caught between his devotion to duty and some tiny spark of inner decency, finally snaps when he spots Cassian. Who has absolutely no idea who Syril is. The result the huge tragedy of Ghorman and the tiny tragedy of Syril feed each other without ever losing focus on just what is happening to the innocents. Kyle Soller has his finest moment – and his last – as Syril, and I am hoping we get to see him do a lot more high profile work.
The last part, “Welcome to the Rebellion,” was a bit of a letdown if only because the shift to something a bit more political and less visceral simply could not compare. Mon Mothma’s last speech condemning Empire and Emperor was pretty good, but it was very much a TV political speech, a bit short and feeling a bit on the nose, but it’s hard to disagree with her assessment of what happens when truth dies. And her escape was well handled. Oh, and Cassian brought home a certain droid from Ghorman and had him reprogrammed, if you like a bit of fan service. All good. But we are suddenly told that Cassian is going to quit the rebellion after this mission, which kind of seems out of character at this moment. And then in order to force Cassian to not quit, Bix leaves him, since the rebellion is bigger than both of them. And that just seems a bit odd, though Bix continues to be a well acted character but not a well written one.
Three parts, or one arc, to go.
“Welcome to the Rebellion” may be where some of the extended universe continuity gets snarled – at least in your specific criticisms. Star Wars Rebels already established that Gold Squadron rescued Mothma and she gave a broader speech to the galaxy. Hence the “they want to rewrite the story” line, and probably why we get a shorter and not as complete speech from Mon this episode.
But, man, the planning and extraction are so good and so tense. One of my favorite episodes of the series. (“Who Are You?” also deserves mention, but… I don’t have as much to say about it, it’s just a roaring fire of awful chaos.)
I suspect that Gilroy so wanted to ignore anything that forced him to acknowledge anything but Rogue One. But everything’s canon now, I guess.
Haha, in the case of K-2SO, he absolutely did. There was some origin story for K2 and Cassian in a comic book or something, and he was like “Yeah I’m not doing that.”
Also, the header image is from the promo stills released for Rick and Morty season 8. I have no idea which episode it’s from or if it will even occur in an episode.
Primal, the rest of S2
The “Colossaeus” three-parter is one of the best things the show has ever done, and it’s unbearably grim. Most of Spear and Fang’s enemies have been vicious but not sadistic–back in S1, a lot of them were, like our protagonists, just predators looking to survive–but the series has steadily introduced more and more active cruelty, and all of it, unsurprisingly, has been tied to the dawn of humanity. With the Egyptians, we get the most advanced civilization yet–a ship that feels like its own destination, not a simple means of conveyance–but the embedded price is a monstrosity that’s simultaneously systematized and personal. Their prisoners are tools to be used, and their personhood is recognized only enough for the queen to find the most effective means of hurting and controlling them. Everything with Kamau and his daughter is heartbreaking, and it only gets worse when the flashback reveals that this was a man who used to take a spider outside rather than squish it.
Also, I should have expected this show to be willing to get absolutely brutal, but Fang’s egg being hurled against the side of the ship and breaking into yolk and blood and half-formed dinosaur still shocked me, especially with the yolk spattering onto Spear’s face.
It’s an incredible set of episodes, and I wish that “Echoes of Eternity” didn’t feel like a slight let-down after all that. The Viking chieftain’s return as a demonic entity featured some amazing imagery–I loved his sizzling walk across the ocean–but the resolution to the fight, after all the phenomenal fight sequences we’ve seen on this show, felt anticlimactic: why pull him back to hell at that exact moment? When disinterested or even actively hostile parties have incidentally worked in our protagonists’ favor before, I always felt like it was for comprehensible reasons. Not so much here, and that made the final battle lose some impact for me. It becomes an excuse to have Spear badly burned and on the point of death so that Mira can conceive his child and let him live on that way, and while I can see how that fits with the themes of the show–it is primal, a primitive biological satisfaction–it doesn’t resonate with me. I like the parent-child relationships that the show invests some time in, like Fang’s protectiveness of her brood or Kamau and his daughter, but Spear fathering a child he’ll never see feels like poor consolation for losing Spear. Worse, like it treats him as fungible, as if he’s still here as long as some of his DNA is still around. I would have been more moved by Mira and Fang, who loved him, going off to hunt at the end, or Mira working on cave art of him, where the sense of loss and acceptance feels more specific and grounded in his identity. But I’ll admit that I’m temperamentally disinclined to care about this kind of thing when it’s only evoked, not developed.
Anyway, despite feeling a little disenchanted with the ending, this was an excellent show: gorgeous, smart, violent, thoughtful, and action-packed.
Murderbot, “Complementary Species”
Fun and entertaining and pacey, as usual.
Gurathin’s backstory reveal was–and you’ll almost never see me have this opinion–interesting and well-done; it helps that we’ve been primed all season to wonder what’s up with him, since Dastmalchian has given him a nervy edge. It’s always felt like his abundance of caution stems from something besides his own inclinations.
The hopper becoming a battle-site-oh-wait-a-something-else-site was clever, especially with the minor twist/complication of the egg sacs being left behind afterwards. (Some great Skarsgard deadpan at the end about those, too.)
I could not live in this commune where we all have to share our resentments towards each other in a ritualized fashion. No thanks. I’m too Midwestern for this shit.
I like everyone realizing that Murderbot says its checking the perimeter partly as an excuse to escape social interaction for a while. I need to start using this myself.
Poker Face, “A New Lease on Death”
Another inoffensive-but-mid S2 episode where the high point is getting to see the excellent and charismatic guest cast–Awkwafina, Alia Shawkat, and Lauren Tom–in action. That NYC apartment was gorgeous. To be fair, I couldn’t completely give this episode a fair shake because partway through it, I found out we’d bombed Iran.
Andor
Actually, I just realized that since I’ve already wound up commenting here on a Monday, I’ll just wait until I’ve watched today’s set of episodes and write them up fresh. Be back in a couple of hours!
I’m a big sucker for go-for-broke narrative beats so I was in awe of the ending of Primal, snatching one last spark of life against (seemingly) insurmountable odds and giving us a final, mythic shot in the process. Further, I don’t think it diminishes Spear’s presence, I think it ensures that he’ll have a legacy after his death, right at the dawn of a new, strange civilization, tying with the overarching themes of the season.
Agreed that it does totally work thematically, so I think this may be a case where my personal feelings are overwhelming my critical judgment.
If I’m remembering right, your write-ups about the show are what convinced me to give it a try, so also: thank you for that! This was a hell of a ride and gloriously epic.
My pleasure.
Coming in late, but I’m with you on Primal’s ending being a bit of a letdown. And maybe a bit simplistic in its implications. “Survival” and “Procreation” have a fair amount of overlap, the latter is what insures the former for a species as opposed to an individual, but given that the entire show has been about two different species collaborating to survive the swerve (although set up by Fang’s uh efforts in this regard earlier) feels like a misplaced focus. And while the show does not make this argument, its intensity can be read as survival = procreation, which leaves out non-procreators. I think there is a darker and underexplored facet of this in the previous episodes, where Kamau trades his daughter’s survival — procreation #1! — against obliterating entire societies, he definitely doesn’t feel good about doing that and the show does not stint on what that looks like, but I don’t think it really engages with this imbalance. All in all the show fucking rules though.
I didn’t connect it with Kamau, but that’s a really interesting point: the show concentrates on his devastation at what he’s forced to do (a lot of those violent scenes, in contrast to the others the show has provided, stay tight on his face and body: his trapped expression and his fundamentally puppeteered actions, the same mechanical movements performed over and over again in an almost industrialized slaughter, all very evocative) and is less interested in the other side of that particular trolley problem. Which is fair enough, of course–and I certainly found him sympathetic and suspect most parents would do what he does–but also an indication of what the show’s thinking about in these last few episodes.
Great point about the industrialization aspect of the slaughter — it is dehumanizing to the slaughteree but also to the slaughterer, and yet the slaughterer is de-humanized metaphorically and the slaughterees are literally turned into corpses. This false equivalence is what helps keep the industrialization going.
Oh, yeah, I caught this Murderbot last night, and I will have more to say Sunday, probably, but I also enjoyed getting more detail on Gurathin and on the growing conflict between Murderbot and the crew about “how to keep everyone alive”– let alone that we still have hanging over all this the fact that someone seems to clearly want the crew dead and we don’t know who or why.
And today’s viewing:
Andor, “One Year Later,” “Sagrona Teema,” and “Harvest”
* Cassian’s plotline for this arc has a killer start: I love his struggle to figure out the new TIE fighter’s controls when there is, to put it mildly, a ticking clock. But while having his hand-off get fucked by another Rebel faction who don’t know who he is but see the Imperial test pilot uniform and Imperial fighter and assume the worst is a brilliant move, the intra-group squabbling is unusually dull for this show. But “Harvest” does give us Cassian landing back home just in time for everything to have gone epically to shit–their tenuous sense of safety gone, Brasso dead, Bix freshly traumatized, flight necessary once again–and that works well. *pours one out for Brasso*
* Bix has an encounter with an Imperial officer looking to leverage her undocumented status for sex, and it goes, grimly, inevitably, exactly where you’d think it would. Which is not me complaining about it being predictable. It’s 100% what would happen, and Bix knew it from the start too. If there’s a sadder beat in it than her trying to tell the other officer outside that the dead man was trying to rape her, I don’t know what it is, because again, she knows, as we do, that even if the authorities believed her, they wouldn’t care.
* Mon Mothma’s plot wins this arc for me, and it’s honestly doing everything I want the show to do in a stunning fashion. Spectacular Genevieve O’Reilly here as she struggles with seeing her daughter through an elaborate, beautiful wedding that she fully believes will ruin Leida’s happiness–a wedding she would never have allowed if she hadn’t desperately needed Sculdun’s help covering up the funds she’s given to the Rebellion, which means she can’t help feeling like she’s sold her teenage daughter, even if it’s to help save the galaxy. And Leida’s conviction that this is the best thing for her–that it’s rock-solid and meaningful in a way that her mother’s broader perspective isn’t–means they can’t connect at all, and Mon’s last-minute attempt to give her a way out of it gets bitterly rejected. And on top of all THAT, you have Tay Kolma in dire financial straits, drinking heavily and talking about how he’s maybe been a bit badly treated by the Rebellion. Mon Mothma has to know about his imminent, pragmatic execution by Luthen’s people–has to help confirm that it needs to happen–and so her just giving herself over to sound and movement in that final dance sequence is despairing and incredible. Great pacing, great use of personal and political stakes, great sense of how the revolutionary sausage is made and what it does to the people who make it, great acting. Just awesome.
* Jumping off that, I loved Luthen in one of his conversations with Mon there, where–not wanting to believe it’s so quickly come to this–she acts like she doesn’t know what he means when he’s speaking around the necessity of Tay’s death: “How nice for you.” Yep, that’s the guy who knows he’s had to make himself a monster for the sake of a brighter future he’ll never see. It’s one line, and Skarsgard makes it feel like a fully formed sequel to his big speech last season.
* Always great to see Ben Mendelsohn.
* The briefing where the Imperial officers are filled in on the plans for the upcoming Ghorman genocide–with the exact measures to be taken couched in vague language–is incredibly chilling, especially with the mood-shift from the spot-on 1950s-esque informational broadcast to the discussion of what’s to come. I’m unsurprised that this was inspired by Conspiracy, because that’s certainly what I thought of while watching it. It’s a meeting that looks like a meeting, with the same kinds of people you always see, including the department who’s way too excited about their banal(ly evil) work and way too eager to tell you about how important it is … and it’s discussing how to best justify mass extermination to the wider populace. Dedra here even feels like a riff on Colin Firth’s Stuckart, where you could mistake the initial reluctance as conscience until it turns out that no, it’s just about pride and emotional investment in another project.
* Love seeing Dedra and Syril’s life together, even though I somehow don’t think these crazy fascist kids are going to be all right. But the dinner with Eedy was *chef’s kiss,* with Dedra taking the reins to make it clear that Eedy will have a relationship with Syril only to the extent that she doesn’t belittle him and make him a nervous wreck (genuine sympathetic LOL at him having to excuse himself to go flop face-down on the bed during the middle of dinner). Has Syril to some extent only traded having one person in charge of his life for another person? Sure, but at least Dedra is the person he’s choosing, and she has some genuine respect and affection for him in return (way more than his mother has, anyway). That’s definitely a step up.
Particularly grim once the penny drops that the outside officer doesn’t respond to her screams, but does to Lt. Krole’s. One wonders if this is a routine he’s familiar with.
Awesome writeups as always.
Yeah, it’s so bleak and believable that you can see him process, “Oh, that’s him screaming, I should intervene.” (And thank you!)
A couple more Matlock‘s. Maybe have said this before, but I’m impressed with the way the show pulls off its tonal balance. Like if you pitched me “Matlock, but the central silly lawyer is actively investigating one of the most heinous and tragic crimes of our time” I would be ready to tune in for hilarious, cringey camp. But this works! We can have ridiculous court proceedings (I like how every judge is like a pro-wrestling ref shrugging his shoulders helplessly as the Iron Sheik brings a crowbar into the arena) and we can have a genuinely affecting drama intermingled. Quite a feat and maybe impossible without Kathy Bates who is absolutely on fire in this show. Only a few episodes to go in the season, this is my equivalent of blazing through a show.
Yeah, haha, the legal rigor of the courtroom scenes and cases is… not great, but I watch the show for the drama, not the strict accuracy, and it certainly delivers on that front, especially down the stretch. (I do like “Belly of the Beast,” which I think was the mid-season finale, where Matty has to go against her sympathies and moral values with a plaintiff to focus on her larger goal of being on the Wellbrexa team and having access to the information she needs.)
What’s the last episode you saw?