Blackmoor Vituperative

Just finished “The Boys” on Amazon Prime. Great cast, great production values, pretty good cinematography when they could hold the camera still (the sooner “drunken monkey cam” dies a horrible painful death, the better). If only they had used those resources to tell a story that wasn’t an awful piece of garbage. WOW. Eight hours of my life, wasted.

I kept watching because the cast was great and the production values were great. With those, you would have to actively try to make a horrible a piece of crap to keep from making at least a halfway decent show. Which is apparently what they did, because it was a horrible piece of crap right up to the very end. Just a beautifully made, well acted pile of garbage. I kept thinking, “It has to get better…” Nope.

This may well be the worst superhero show I have ever seen. Worse than the recent “Titans” TV show. Worse than “Mutant X”. Worse than “Street Hawk”. Worse than “Black Scorpion”.

If you want to see a show with the premise, “What if nearly everyone in the world were sociopaths?”, watch Fox News. Skip “The Boys”.

People say we are in a gilded age of this or that. Fantasy TV. Superhero movies. Whatever.

I am not sure I agree.

How many Batmen have we seen? How many Spider-Men? How many Avengers movies? Can you recall what happened in which movie? In which one did Quicksilver die? In which one did Quicksilver rescue people from a house? The colors blur in my memory until it is a mottled brown expanse.

Take Spider-Man. Some people like Tom Holland in the role. Some don’t. I don’t think I have an opinion. It’s like trying to have an opinion about one squawk in a cacophony of geese. It’s all just noise to me now. A Spider-Gwen movie might rise above that noise like a black and pink bouy in a sea of diluted mud, but it might not.

Just watched the first episode of Titans. It’s an interesting take on the characters. Sort of a dark, low-budget alternate universe interpretation. It’s better than any of the trailers and promo material made it look. Even their version of Starfire is actually pretty interesting, despite the liberties they took with the character.

On one level, I wonder why they bothered calling this “Titans” when the characters are so different from their comicbook and cartoon counterparts. It’s the same thing I wonder about Star Trek Discovery. It’s not a bad show, but it’s so clearly not Star Trek — why bother trying to piggyback on the Star Trek name?

But I guess that answers my question. Even though they are pretty good, these shows wouldn’t have a fraction of the viewers if they didn’t have a recognized name plastered on them.

Update: Up to episode 7, the one where the bad guys are precognitive and the good guys are morons: two of my least favourite superhero tropes. The show is paused and I am debating whether to just stop here and add this to the growing list of genre TV shows I stopped watching midway through the first season.

Update: I gritted my teeth and got past the dumb part, and it got a bit better. This was the worst episode so far. Most of the show has actually been pretty good, so I’ll keep watching it.

In general, I think this is an interesting “alternate universe” take on the Teen Titans.

Incidentally, you know what this episode felt like? It felt like the suits didn’t like the way the show was going, and forced the writers to make a detour. The same shit happened to the 2007 “Bionic Woman” remake.

Suits, man. 🙁

Update: They’ve done a much better job with Hawk & Dove than they did with Cloak & Dagger. I bailed on Cloak & Dagger after six episodes, and I would not have gotten that far if I didn’t love the comic and kept hoping the show would get better.

Update: Episode 10. I’m just of kind of rolling my eyes at it now. It hasn’t gotten any better since things took a suckward turn at episode 7. I’ll let it play out while I am working, but I won’t be looking for a second season of this, if there is one.

Final update: And I’m done. That’s 11 hours I’d like to get back. Re-watching the Teen Titans cartoon would have been a better use of my time.

“The Umbrella Academy”: well, that was a waste of time. It’s 50 minutes of interesting ideas spread over ten freaking hours. On the other hand, they did a good job of spreading those ideas out so that it just barely kept me watching all the way to the end. That’s more than I can say for “The Gifted”, or “Runaways”, or “Tomorrow People”, or “Agents Of Shield”, or “Legion”, or “Cloak And Dagger”, or …

“Cloak And Dagger” was the biggest disappointment. I loved that comic (for the first year or two, anyway… it went downhill later).

The only superhero TV show I am currently watching that I actually like is “Supergirl”, but that’s on some thin ice, too. The whole previous season was “blarg” with “our new best friend who appeared out of nowhere and who is not at all the same person as the new villain who appeared out of nowhere”. Basically, again, one episode worth of story spread over an entire season.

But I’m not sure I will make it all the way through this season of “Supergirl”. We just finished episode 3, and I have had more than enough angry, bigoted shitheads for a whole season. It’s bad enough half the country is infested with these malicious buffoons, we have to see them every week on “Supergirl” now, too?

Tonight’s entertainment was the first episode of the new season of Doctor Who (which is either the 11th season or the 37th, depending on when you start counting… I’m going to call it the 37th season, but I may be the only one). We enjoyed it, and I like Jodie Whittaker. I really hate the new Doctor Who’s outfit, though. I loved the previous Doctor Who’s outfit, and I really liked Peter Capaldi, but I got bored with his run by his third or fourth episode and stopped watching them, so I guess an outfit isn’t everything.

I am little a puzzled by the … what’s the opposite of a cliffhanger? Leaving things out at the beginning. How did Peter Capaldi turn into Jodie Whittaker? What happened to the Tardis? I guess it doesn’t really matter.

It took fourteen episodes, but I have found the first bad episode of “Enterprise”. I mean, the “Tripp Has Nipples On His Arm” episode was not great, but this is genuinely bad: season 1, episode 15, “Shadows of BDSM”.

Archer and T’Pol are captured by rebels. I’m only halfway through, but so far, Archer and T’pol have had a tied-up “Oops! My face is in your boobs!” moment, and now they are in Shibari style bondage and trying to eat oatmeal.

Ugh.

But most episodes so far have been pretty good, and some have been really good. For example, “Enterprise” season 1, episode 7: “The Andorian Incident”, featuring the brilliant Jeffrey Combs.

“For people without emotions, you sure have a flair for the dramatic!”

— Charles “Trip” Tucker III, to a Vulcan monk who just did something unexpected.

By the way, I haven’t seen any of these episodes since they were first broadcast. I seem to recall people being super critical of this show, but I am enjoying it so far. I really like the cast, particularly Jolene Blalock, John Billingsley, and Linda Park. But really, I like the whole cast.

P.S. I spoke too soon. This episode just got good.

Susan described this to me, and I created it.

From the files of… IT’S THE SAME GUY! We bring you the case of Stewart Moss and Bradford Dillman. We saw ONE of these men playing a Kelvan on the original Star Trek. Which of them was it? YOU make the call!

Humanity’s love for authority figures is annoying. “Alien” (1979) gave us a perfect, self-sufficient, self-propagating alien species. “The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.” So naturally a sequel introduced a superfluous “queen”. “Star Trek The Next Generation” gave us the Borg, a hive mind with no leaders, no individual thought: a society of perfect, remorseless unity. So naturally “Star Trek: First Contact” (1996) introduced another superfluous “queen”.

It’s like we can’t even conceive of a society without authority figures, even an alien one.

“The human race is a remarkable creature, one with great potential, and I hope that ‘Star Trek’ has helped to show us what we can be if we believe in ourselves and our abilities.”
— Gene Roddenberry