Mokka mit Schlag » Pop Culture

Yes, I know I’m a little late to the party, but I’m about through the end of Season 1 of Severance, and there’s one meta question I’m asking myself. No, it’s not what is actually going on, how does severance work, or what the purpose of the Lumon Corporation is, though these are all reasonable questions. My question is more what kind of show am I watching? In particular, am I watching a show like Lost and Dollhouse or am I watching a show like The Prisoner or The X-Files? Because if it’s the latter, I’m going to hate myself for getting sucked into this.
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Watching Season 2 of Wednesday on Netflix, and I finally see why this series doesn’t connect the way the movies did, despite an excellent cast, sets, characters, directing, budget, dialog, dancing, costumes, and everything else. At a deep level they are telling the wrong story.
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Last year I spent a couple of weeks laid up in the hospital with pneumonia, during which I watched a lot of Netflix as I drifted in and out of consciousness in between being woken up by nurses checking my vitals. I rewatched pretty much all of Sex and the City, and it still holds up really well 25 years later. It’s actually an unusual show in that it worked better week by week and season by season, maybe because the stories really do advance in more or less real time as the series continues. Big to Aidan to Big to Aleksandr to Big again just races by way too fast when you’re binging.

I rewatched The Good Place, and that series does flow better when binging. When it first aired, I had a very hard time keeping track of the story from about the middle of Season 2 to the end. There’s just too much going on and it’s too unusual to remember from one fall to the next. Not to mention the network kept moving it around and I missed episoides. But binging has none of those problems, and let’s you see just how truly great this series is.

And then there’s Reba.
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Episode 6. Wow. Hooded Justice is the character I’ve wanted for decades and never, ever seen. Superman may have fought the klan, and Captain America fought the Nazis; but no superhero I can think of has ever taken on real, non-cartoon evil in their own society quite so directly. Indeed that’s the fundamental flaw of all the godlike beings like Superman, Captain Marvel, and Green Lantern. For all their power, they never turn it toward building a better world. The Joker is a psychopathic serial killer, but he doesn’t have a body count anywhere near a run-of-the-mill U.S. president.
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Veidt’s in space. I had pretty much figured that out already, but now it’s confirmed. I didn’t recognize exactly where, perhaps one of the moons of Jupiter? I assume Dr. Manhattan put him there. I can’t imagine anyone else could have done it, but why?
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So Laurie Jupiter, now Laurie Blake, showed up and finally we have a character we can root for. That’s a big step forward. I don’t know why she;s using her father’s name now. He was a pretty bad guy and she was not fond of him to say the least. Perhaps this will be revealed later. Anyway, I’m still watching.