Okay, They ARE Out To Get You - Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

 

Premiering this past Tuesday (Oct. 6) on Fox was the sci-fi action series Next.
Starring Madmen alum John Slattery as tech billionaire Paul LeBlanc, and Fernada Andrade as FBI

agent Shea Salazar, an unlikely alliance as LeBlanc warns that the company he founded and was recently ousted from has apparently unleashed a digital monster he'd once worked on then locked away with explicit instructions to never restart the project. Well, what should one expect a tech company, now bereft of its brilliant founder's daily input, to do if it's trying to perform for the next quarterly report and knows there's a potential financial bonanza possibly mostly completed, and only sealed away because the former boy genius had just gone off his meds?
  When I started watching it I had more than simple deja vu, because the show was originally scheduled to be a mid-season replacement for the 2019/20 season, and promo material had been out in a timeframe appropriate for that. This was before, in the year of the plague, they decided to move it to a fall slot when they realized with essentially all filming and most production on everything shut down around mid-March that they were likely to be running into a dearth of new projects ready to air.

  At this point I only have any details on ten episodes, so I've no idea how complete a package this season is even if all the produced episodes are aired. It seems likelier this year that all shows will be aired when replacement material is more likely to be lacking, but low ratings make for poor ad revenues, and rerunning more popular material is still likely to win out in the end.
  The concept, though hardly original, remains compelling enough to drive the series for at least a bit, though I've no idea if the show's writer's room has sufficient brainpower to write for a villain that's supposed to be exponentially smarter than any human being. The odds seem slim, so I'll be expecting it to quickly slide into dramatic distractions that will mask incompetence. Still, that's getting ahead of things. I'll keep an eye on the show, most likely via Hulu as it seems the new episodes show up there the next day.
  If one's looking for a more complete and rounded source of paranoia, the 13-episode first season of the CBS series Evil  landed on Netflix on October 1st. That ate the majority of my "new to me" watching time this week, hence the lack of variety.
  The show centers on a small team whose mission, funded by the Catholic Church, is to assess the supernatural aspects of various phenomena and events. Essentially to render a determination on whether each is a legitimately supernatural event, and which are either psychiatric conditions or, possibly, simple frauds perpetrated either for profit or as part of a legal defense. Ultimately it's a horror procedural that takes an increasing turn toward conspiracy. One might see it as having been a little ahead of the 2020 curve.
  The episodes and characters are generally compelling, making good use of dream sequences and hallucinations without reducing them to cheap gimmicks.

  A mix of familiar faces in key roles, along with several, able, newer faces. These include Mike Colter (who played Luke Cage for several years across multiple seasons and several series as part of Netflix's Marvel Cinematic Universe shows), Katja Herbers (who played Emily Grace in HBO's Westworld

series), Aasif Mandvi (British-American actor and comedian who was a regular on The Daily Show), which three make up the core investigative team. The man of faith, the lapsed Catholic with psychiatric credentials, and the atheist from a Muslim family who is their tech-savvy debunker. Michael Emerson (familiar to most from key roles on Lost and Person of Interest) plays Dr. Leland Townsend, an adversary for our heroes. Familiar character actors Christine Lahti and Kurt Fuller ably play essential supporting roles. Other familiar faces appear along the way.
  The first season ran from September of last year through the end of January of this, neatly forming a package that managed to avoid the pandemic shut-downs. The show was sufficiently well-received that CBS approved a second season back in October. Not unexpectedly, while scripts have been developed I've no good source to say how completely the second season is written, and I've seen no confirmation that a date for production (filming) has even been set, though the information I have appears to dead-end back in early August. So... sometime in 2021?
   I show little restraint in these matters, so it's no surprise that I burned through the season in a few days. Enjoyable enough, and strewn with sufficient detail that I could see doing a full rewatch prior to moving into season 2, whenever that'll be.
  The tenth episode, the Christmas season "7 Swans a Singin'", written by the legendary Rockne S. O'Bannon, included as a key element a tune that has been an earworm I don't mind hosting. Here's the scene that introduces it via a glazed, acapella quartet.

   Beyond these shows, this week's seen a couple blind alleys. As a quick for instance, I have no idea what possessed me to start watching Adam Sandler's seasonal latest, Hubie Halloween (Netflix) - I guess I was just looking for a bit of seasonal, self-contained fun. The array of people involved in it is wide enough that one might get some distance into it on that, but much depends on how long one can stand Sandler playing yet another virtuous, mush-mouthed, arrested-in-early-adolescence  who is generally ridiculed and bullied but, we know, will end up being the hero of the piece. Maybe the key is having one or more 8 year-olds to watch this sort of thing with? Lacking that accessory, at least for now this one's not for me.
   This week, BBC America ran the long-lost, 6-part Doctor Who serial from 1967, the penultimate serial of the fourth season, The Faceless Ones. More accurately, this is an animated version made to follow the complete audio track, and such materials as survive. Only episodes 1 and 3 remain intact, but for the sake of visual consistency they re-rendered even those in the same animation. A great many Doctor Who serials (along with so much other programming) from the '60s fell victim to BBC's thrifty policy of regularly wiping videotapes for reuse. Stunningly short-sighted from a modern perspective - honestly even from the '70s onward - but it's the simple truth.

  I almost didn't mention it because they don't have it in their schedule for reruns, at least any time in the next couple weeks, and I've not looked to see if they have it streaming online - a service I've not had the best experiences with. Chances are they'll be showing it again sometime in November or December, as they've been mentioning a Doctor Who focus for the holidays this year.
  Not a bad, little adventure, it ends with the departure of two of the human companions who had joined the cast with the last adventure of season three, The War Machines, the previous year. As Faceless Ones finds them back in roughly June or July of 1966, essentially the same time when they'd first met and fallen in with The Doctor, Ben and Polly decide to go back to their lives.
  As an upcoming programming note, non-canonical, big screen versions of two of the Doctor's adventures are scheduled on Turner Classic Movies next Monday, October 12th. Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD, are scheduled for 9:30 and 11 pm Eastern, respectively. Frequently eschewed by Whovians, presenting a version of the Doctor who introduces himself as "Doctor Who", who is a human scientist who lives and travels with his two granddaughters, and is the inventor of his time and space-spanning TARDIS. The first film, in particular, is thick with exposition, often from the Daleks, and comedic elements pepper both. The films offer two things the tv show of the era didn't: Peter Cushing and color. So, there's that.
   Neither film is much of a triumph, though they did do some redesign of the Daleks to make them look a little more imposing. I mention these more as a curiosity, or maybe even a touch of nostalgia as many of us only ever saw them as late night movies back when local network affiliates used to do that sort of thing after the night's 11:00 news.

   The sequel, which I remember more fondly, with its largely demolished London and Bedforshire settings, and humanity backed to a cliff's edge, performed even more poorly at the box office than the first, so much so that a planned third picture was never made. One of the things that strikes me every time I think of this film is how dismal a future it is, as one looks around at the ruins of 20th century tech, and absorbs that this is supposed to be 2150. Granted, we don't know when the Daleks invaded, but even if we take a nearly impossible stance that they've been on Earth for a full century of occupation, the idea that the world of 2050 offers no tech advances beyond the 1960s seems silly.

   Thursday saw the long-awaited return of Supernatural on the CW, with the first of its final seven episodes. This will be finishing out the fifteenth and final season for this series, launched back in 2005. Original planning would have seen the final episode airing back in May, but the pandemic pause froze it at 13 episodes (already having joined all of the previous seasons on Netflix several months back) until this week's thaw. As I understand it, the next five episodes will wrap the season's story arc, with the 20th and final episode wrapping the series on November 19th, one week before Thanksgiving. Given the standing streaming arrangement for the show, that'll mean those final episodes will join the rest over on Netflix 8 days after airing, so the series will be available in its entirety there on Black Friday.

   For now, I'll be aiming to enjoy the few, remaining episodes. Later I'll give more attention to such post-show plans as the stars of the show have for life after the Winchester saga.
    That's it for me this week.  Take care. Feel free to chime in in the comments below, especially if any of the above worked for you, or if there's something else you've been watching that you'd like to suggest. -- Mike