Interesting- all episodes are available here in Denmark, on HBO Nordic. I’ve seen a few , but not been impressed.
Looks like I’m wrong. All the other episodes have a release date of today. Weird, last night it only had the first episode available.
So do the Druids do actual fuckin magic n shit?
Pretend I’m at work and can easily fuck around on a text-based forum without notice but that videos are hard.
Yes. At level 14 they can cast SoW.
The druids give out drugs and shit. There’s also some hallucination scenes that may or may not be magic. They keep teasing it and everything else is super telegraphed so I assume that yes, there will be magic.
One of the things that made it hardest for me to get into GoT, aside from the dour atmosphere, horrible (as in not nice) characters, creepy rapey sex everywhere, constant death, and the fact that it’ll never get finished (all minor complaints of course :P) was how pointedly unmagical everything felt. I guess there’s a dragon or two in there somewhere, but it’s mostly dudes in chainmail killing each other. Yawn ;-)
You know half of those are like, features for many people :)
Everyone in Britannia, except for a little girl, seems to be a terrible person so far.
Fights kinda boring and I fast forwarded. Dialogue isn’t much to write about either. Everyone magically speaks English. They film all these scenes with a foggy distortion filter around the borders to tell you they are drugged up. Kinda annoying, reminds me of that annoying filter they use around vertical youtubes just so they don’t have to show black borders.
I have received many reminders as of late that my tastes in entertainment drift very far from the mean here :)
Thanks for the insight, though, seriously.
But only for donations. 🤣
Hey now, Slainte the Shaman used to put “donations accepted but not required” on his SoW zone broadcasts! Those were the days, I made so much money off SoW in the Commons, outside Qeynos and a few other choice locations. It sure beat my other money maker, using my DE SK to buy fine steel weapons from players at the Cazic zone line and hauling them back to Ogguk to sell to vendors at a profit.
Oh, man, this is produced by Rick McCallum. That explains a lot.
Wait that’s the dude on Lucas’s SW prequels who was like a walking “Yes man”? parody?
Yes. Ian McDiarmid (Palpatine) is even in this, too.
I fell asleep watching the first episode, but it’s so bad. The writing and camerawork reminds me of 90’s TV.
So, um, I’m kind of enjoying this. Not in any kind of serious dramatic way or in any kind of quality historical fiction way, but more like a weird drug induced hallucination of history, with nudity and violence. The druidic “magic” is portrayed the way druidic magic was portrayed in Bernard Conrwell’s classic King Arthur Trilogy From our modern point of view, it’s explicable by hallucinogenic drugs and the susceptibility of the superstitious population. From their point of view, they believe in magic.
The young actress who plays Cait is doing a very fine job. I’m about 2/3 of the way through and it’s better than I expected.
I finished the season and ended up being disappointed compared to where I was at the 2/3 mark. At the 2/3 point, it felt like the show had a certain narrative momentum and direction and then they just pissed that away. The last two episodes in particular felt like “oh we got renewed so let’s string this MF-er OUT!!” Pretty bad IMO. Very little resolution, not even obviously foreshadowed stuff. Overall the series is weak and I won’t be watching season 2.
It wasn’t terrible but it was flawed and cheesy and ended up not having a satisfactory narrative or resolution.
The ups: The series looks bloody gorgeous at times. Although perhaps a little too pretty, reminds me of some overly colored MMO I havent played. Some of the humour is giggle worthy. The young lass who travels throughout the series was impressive. Mackenzie Crook was fun even if mainly for the scary ‘should have been a video game villain’ makeup.
The downs: Everything else. I must find out who wrote this garbage and make a point of actively avoiding their work. Like the guy who wrote Lost. Ewwww. Story is all over the place, token boobs and sex, predictable ‘shocking’ violent moments, Peaky Blinder-esque completely inappropriate modern music, loads of bad swearing that thinks its cool and finally a bunch of actors who really should be making terribad theatre somewhere local.
Score: 2/10
So I am three episodes in and so far I totally agree that the show is a complete mess. I often feel like I’m watching the second season, as I feel like the show is expecting me to understand the history and motivation of many of the characters despite only giving them a few throwaway lines of dialog about their background. One prime example : If the whole point of the Gaul warrior guy cuckolding the king’s son with his hot wife (at the King’s insistence) is to cement an alliance between his kingdom and Gaul, then why aren’t they sending for warriors from his tribe to help against the Romans? Instead it seems like the real reason the relationship exists is to make us feel sorry for the king’s son and provide sexy time scenes on demand.
I do agree with @SilentMind, the cinematography in the series is fantastic. Several times I’ve seen drone or wide-angle shots of characters in the countryside and thought “damn, I’d like to live there, it’s beautiful”. I also think they’ve tried to do a decent job with costuming, makeup and sets, as each faction definitely has it’s own distinctive look and feel, even between the different Celts.
That acting though. Thus far the only actors in the series I have enjoyed watching are the teenage girl who seems to be a main character, the king’s son who seems to be equal parts smarmy and likeable, and the Roman general and his second in command, both of whom are doing a decent acting job with the terrible script they’ve been given. The writers for this show need to be sacked, and new people who have a familiarity with actual realistic dialog and character development need to be brought in.
All that said, it’s a period show at a time when most of the period shows I watch (Game of Thrones, Vikings, Last Kingdom, etc.) are off the air…so I may actually stick it out and power through the rest of the episodes.
Yeah, this thing is an awful mess, isn’t it?
It’s the equivalent of watching a Homer Simpson ghost story, where it keeps looping back “Oh, did we mention that this is going on at the same time? BECAUSE IT IS! AND IT’S IMPORTANT! (Oh, we may not mention it again for another three episodes.)”
I’m trying to think of a serious and big scope British made fantasy/sci-fi series that wasn’t a bit crap and failing. If its fairly schlocky/tongue in cheek then Dr Who is a big franchise but we’ve never done anything I ended up an actual fan of like ST, B5, GoT, BSG etc the North Americans make.
Black Mirror?