Mokka mit Schlag » Pop Culture

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.

Episode 2 didn’t answer many questions but it did reinforce my feeling that every adult in this series is a bad guy: cops, terrorists, “super” “heroes”, everyone.

One new revelation: Veidt has become a narcissistic psychopath. He was always a mass murderer, but thirty years ago it was at least possible to  read him as someone who had done the math and killed millions to save billions. Now, however, he apparently is willing to burn people to death for his personal amusement. Just maybe Mr. Phillips and the other servants are all some sort of robots or not fully sentient artificial life forms—they don’t exactly act like normal human beings—but even if that proves to be the case, the simulated subtraction of Mr. Phillips’s intrinsic field seemed pointless and cruel. Frankly I’m not thrilled with this development. It seems very out of character for him.

One new question: why did Laurie Jupiter decide to take her father’s name? Hard to believe she simply got tired of explaining how to spell Juspeczyk. Not hugely important, but I am curious. Possibly the name change was also mentioned in the previews, but if so I missed it until the end of this week’s episode.

P.S. I don’t consider Doomsday Clock canonical or worth reading, an opinion I apply to pretty much everything Geoff Johns is involved with. That’s the problem with non-creator owned properties. Even if a work is a recognized classic for 25 years, eventually some corporate bean counter is going to decide to milk it for a few more dollars.

I watched the first season of Call The Midwife when it was first made available in the US, on PBS I think? I enjoyed it then and recently I noticed several more seasons were available on Netflix so I’ve been binging then. It’s a truly excellent show utterly unlike anything I’ve ever seen on American television. It is almost completely divorced from the usual tropes of TV drama, perhaps because it’s based very closely on the real memoirs of Jennifer Worth.
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