Wasn’t interested in Del Toro show but hearing Cosmatos directed one episode made me watch it and I wasn’t disappointed. I really like his dirty synth driven atmospheres.
Space Force S1 was pretty good. It’s basically “Michael Scott runs NASA,” with John Malkovich being very much his usual self. S2, on the other hand, sucked.
DeepT
2691
I didn’t care for space force. I watched season one and thought it was ‘meh’ and hoped season 2 would be better. It wasn’t.
Looks like 1899 is out now. How is it?
Certainly atmospheric, but the end of the first episode left me a bit cold. I don’t know if I’ll watch more of it. Maybe if there are good comments here.
Sharpe
2694
I watched the first episode and found it potentially interesting but also slow and obtuse. I’ll probably give it another episode. My view at this point, it could go either way.
LockerK
2695
New seasons of Dead to Me and Inside Job out today as well. Plus a mini series about the kids who tried to buy a jet with Pepsi points back in the 90s. Good weekend!
It was… weird. I didn’t like it, but I enjoyed it.
My favorite part was when the kid walked out of the cabinet and hands his mom the oversized d4 while Jefferson Airplane plays in the background
Dead to Me is awesome and last season has been great.
1899 is miniseries or will there be more seasons?
Probably a miniseries. A bit like Lost, a bit like Sucker Punch.
1899 is something. I made it all the way through, so it’s not terrible and there is enough to draw you along. But the characters are ciphers, their motivations are a mystery or, occasionally, transparently silly. It’s quite hard to like any of them. Each revelation of a piece of the truth seems to call into question the choices we have already seen them make. And the final reveal IMO commits one of the cardinal sins of resolution in fiction.
And yes, I think they’re hoping there are more seasons.
Does it wrap up fairly well, or does it leave you Lost, with no answers?
I found the first episode mediocre. I’m not investing time in the rest if the end is an unresolved mess.
It answers some questions, but introduces a bunch more, including recasting the central question and asking it again.
It’s ultimately a bit silly. The resolution to the whole season is available by the end of the first episode, in the hands of characters who are disposed to trust each other; yet none of them offer it or act on it. Their behavior is perverse when seen in retrospect from the standpoint of the end.
It’s all style, throwaway. Which is how I ultimately found Dark, actually.
Sharpe
2703
Yeah after season 2 of Dark, an abortive attempt at the first episode of Tribes of Europa and four episodes of 1899 I’ve come to the opinion that the excellent first season of Dsrk is the exception and this creative team is fluky not consistent.
I loved Dark, but ended up lukewarm toward 1899. It’s a trippy puzzle box but the most important characters felt thinly developed. There’s a reveal as to what’s going on, but it felt arbitrary.
I still don’t know if I liked it or not - but something I wish I had known before watching the first episode: the characters in the original version are all speaking different languages. For whatever reason, netflix chose the default version of the show to have a full English dub.
This means not only is the sound weird because they dub even the English voices with new voices, but there are interactions where the characters are not supposed to understand each other that make zero sense to the audience because everyone is speaking English.
Just make sure you change the language to the original language to give the show a fair shot
I don’t know if that’s the default. I didn’t change any settings and I got the full language spread. But I do watch everything in original language so it may actually remember that, which would be nice.
Watched the first episode of Our Universe, Netflix’s new prestige nature/science series. It’s an odd beast. It doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be an animal documentary or a physics one, and the thread tying it together is tenuous at best (mainly repeated and often facile references to energy and vague connections to the wider universe/big bang). What science there is is explained in a very superficial manner. Meanwhile the animal behaviour is nothing we haven’t seen before a million times, namely cheetah hunts and wildebeest crossing crocodile infested rivers. That said, there are some nice aerial shots.
I turned that show on expecting something more cosmic, and I was quite disappointed. I was not expecting to watch a cheetah chase a potential meal around, and how the sun->plants->animals works. I don’t think I made it more than 1/2 an episode before turning it off.
DeepT
2709
My fundamental gripe with new science shows is that they are for people who have never watched a science show. So if you have watched other science shows, then there is rarely, if ever, anything new explained. Its all very basic stuff.
