Are you supposed to be here? How do you feel about that? - Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

 

  

  The final week of April, Wednesday saw the - actually rather late for me - beginning of the seasonal shift for me as I shut the windows and put on the air conditioning. I'm not fond of indoor temps getting above the (very) low 70s, and prefer most of the moisture wrung out of the air. The only dangers once I do this are forgetting to be more attentive to drinking enough water, and steeling my nerves against the next electric bill.
    Arriving on Netflix just over a week ago was a science fiction adventure of the very possibly imminent near future: Stowaway (2021 TV-MA, 1 hr 56 min)
     It could be seen more as a moral drama with a science-heavy setting, as it doesn't involve any leaps of technology, simply laying out an adventure that could be happening now, requiring only the cash and the will to do it -- but it's still easier to just reference it as science fiction.
     A pair of research scientists, trained as astronauts, head on a two year mission to Mars with a distinguished career astronaut in command. Of course, something goes wrong, and existing in such extreme conditions one problem tends to cause others, and details become critically important.

     With a cast of just four, set aboard a spare, modular craft, it's a necessarily tight production.
     Anna Kendrick plays Zoe Levenson, a very young doctor and research scientist who applied to the program on a lark, expecting to have the application and its expected rejection add an eccentric footnote to her career. Daniel Dae Kim plays David Kim, a botanical researcher whose mission goal was to cultivate basic green plants and algae while on Mars, expecting this mission to likely be both a career pinnacle and the true start of man's foothold on an alien world. Toni Collette is Marina Barnett, senior crewmember, mission commander, and seasoned astronaut on what is to be her final mission. Shamier

Anderson plays Michael Adams, part of the ground technical crew for the launch who becomes the severe wildcard for the mission. This is directed by Joe Penna, a Brazilian who humbly started his career on YouTube, and co-written by Penna and Ryan Morrison, the latter previously only credited as an editor. Everyone has to start somewhere.
     I gave this a late-night watch, and wasn't hyper-vigilant for any technical details being off -- it's a dramatic entertainment, part of the fare streaming on a service I've been plugged into for over six years. It's an engaging subject, and that remains even if there seems to be something of a plot hole concerning the exact circumstances of how Michael came to be where he is.
     Not that all filmed entertainments have to eventually include four hour director's cuts, but I would be interested to know how many scenes were cut - be it ones that were filmed and eliminated for running time, and those eliminated earlier, during rewrites -- likely both, primarily, to keep it just under two hours. Much of this arises due to critical info that doesn't seem to be presented, and a title that seems to be a misleading misnomer, though it may be indicative of a significant subplot they decided to ditch. I can't help but think there was more exposition at least written, likely some of it filmed, but ultimately cut for time and possible fears about the shallowness of attention of many potential viewers.
     When I first saw an ad for this I couldn't help but immediately think of a 1954 short story, Tom Godwin's The Cold Equations, which is the classic go-to for the subject of a stowaway in space-faring fiction. If you're interested in giving it a listen, either as a first time exposure or a refresher (I probably haven't reread is since I was 11 or 12) there's at least one reading of the story sitting on YouTube

     Or, if you want to take it at your own reading speed, here's a link to the full story, complete with John Campbell's (the story first appeared in the August 1954 issue of his Astounding Science Fiction) preface. It's a powerful short story, and something of an instant classic in the genre, along with being a terrific seed for a discussion about morality and ethics in the event of a true dilemma.

     Shifting sharply to what we still think of as broadcast tv, there are several shows I follow but don't find myself saying much about, and nearly all of these are on the CW, and have Greg Berlanti involved.

These include the raft of DC comics adaptations, ranging from the already completed Arrow (2012-2020) to the still-going Flash, the generally goofy DC's Legends of Tomorrow, Superman & Lois, Supergirl and  Black Lightning, the latter two currently in their final seasons. Popcorn tv, they're not shows I go out looking to recruit viewers for, but they've each managed to get one or more hooks in deeply enough that I remain interested. To borrow a term from an associate blogger, all of these series involve a scene, pretty much once a week (sometimes more), where someone delivers a motivational speech to someone that's rich with feeeeeeeeelings. Sometimes these speeches are more convincing than other times, sometimes it's more forced (accompanied by signature musical themes) than I can take without it triggering an eye roll. The hero was inside you all along! type messages, more often than not. It may be advisable to check one's blood sugar after listening to one. Were I so inclined and didn't have to get up by any particular time the next day, I'd entertain the drinking games lurking in the formula of these shows. Berlanti Bingo cards may already be a thing. I'm a little afraid to look.
     Another, recently-launched series that Berlanti is co-producing is Kung Fu. I've read that this is the third attempt by Berlanti and others to produce another modern version based (conceptually) on the still-familiar 1970s David Carradine vehicle, with this being the first of the attempts to move to the shooting of a pilot and then a series nod. I'll attribute most of the previous failure to them trying to do this over on Fox. Really, it's a mercy Fox didn't greenlight one, because it would have almost certainly just struggled and died there.
     Sporting a largely Asian-American cast, this new series centers on a young woman (law school drop-out Nicky Shen, played by Olivia Liang) who ran from family pressures - almost exclusively from the tiger mom who drove her to academic excellence and the search for a Chinese husband - and inadvertently fell into a monastic life in mainland China for three years. There her life was redefined and, of course, she became proficient in martial arts, because you can't call a show Kung Fu and not expect someone's ass to be kicked at least once each week.

     A sudden, violent and devastating attack effectively destroyed that refuge, kicking Nicky back out into the world with two missions: One, to reconnect with the family and friends she unceremoniously abandoned three years earlier, and two, to uncover the mystery of the woman who killed her mentor and stole an ancient sword she'd been protecting. Cue a greater conspiracy and mounting mystical threats. Mid-way in the mix, she gets to put her skills to use dealing with local crime. It's a great way to break the ice.
     While the lead does engage in some flashbacks to her time in China, she tends to more often have real-time dialogues with her dead mentor; how much this may be actual spiritual visitations and how much just tiny time pills of wisdom digesting to bring the lead a helpful, weekly, guiding illusion as needed, is up to the viewer to decide. It's more obviously the latter, as she and her various helpers have to do all the detective work.
     Airing Wednesday nights (again, on the CW - simulcast on CTV for our Canadian friends) the show's only four episodes in, and I believe they can be easily streamed on the CW's app. The cast is generally good, the pacing seems fine (though based on some reviews, many others seem to have very low tolerances for exposition, seeming to want either a sizzle reel of fight and romance scenes, or a Punch & Judy style puppet show), and despite the ass-kicking and trail of fallen bodies it all seems terribly wholesome with lessons about friends and family, so there's potentially broad appeal. There's even a fairly good romantic triangle, if you're up for that sort of thing. Seems a little cruel to reference it as a triangle, as the fiance Nicky abandoned now has a new gal (everyone's entirely too good-looking, of course, so it would be strange if they were in town for long and didn't have dates), but heck if I can remember Fallback Gal's name, much less anything else about her. Ideally they'll give her a nod along the way - a scene written to momentarily elevate her above the level of plot device. Then we can forget her with clear consciences.

     Jumping to Amazon Prime (and at least a chunk of them, out for general consumption on YouTube), and a completely different sort of series, I have one that may be nostalgic for those in the UK, as it appears to have run from 1994 through 2003 -- but I don't recall hearing of it. Maybe some PBS stations picked it up along the way, or maybe it was judged to be too geographically narrow to bother importing back then. It's a forensic archeology show called Classic Time Team.
     Each episode, a team of historians, archeologists and technical experts descend on a location in the British Isles in an attempt to reconstruct moments in history -- centered on long-vanished fortresses, towns, major encampments, and battlefields. Here's the closest I could quickly come to a trailer, as the show's lead shares a clip from a mostly-lost 1992 pilot that does a nice job of showing an average show's set-up.

     Each episode is a self-contained, 50-minute mini-documentary, and an interesting opportunity to either refresh one's memory of history or find something out about the sort of minutiae that was relentlessly pumped into hapless British schoolchildren for so many years by authorities who want them to know how great their ancestors were when they were in some stage of kicking someone's butt and/or royally ruling some great chunk of the world.
     Okay, I'm maybe being a tad unfair there.
     With history that includes being outposts in the Roman Empire, there's a great deal for them to reconstruct. As the descendant of traitorous former subjects of the Crown, there were rather few historical, Brit-centric dates I've known much of my life - 1066 at Hastings, 1215 and the signing of the Magna Carta, and 23rd November 1963, with the first broadcast of Doctor Who. A show like this is an entertaining, encapsulated way to expand one's historical knowledge beyond those bare bones, and the enthusiasm of the academics involved is at least a little infectious.

     While you may never dazzle someone with tidbits of knowledge about Alfred the Great and his followers, hanging on by their fingernails as invading Viking forces hunted them, hiding out in a nasty bog before making a major comeback, it's still much better than just wondering if he's the one who said "What, me worry?"
     It's not a show I would binge, but, more interestingly, it's an excellent one to watch and then either take notes for subsequent research dives, or to pause frequently while checking this that bit out. Presumably the latter requires either being a solo viewer or having a very special sort of viewing companion.

     HBO's Sunday additions, the Victorian The Nevers and Mare of Easttown, continue to keep me coming back, each in its own fashion. (Links there go back to the Friday pieces where I discussed each.) With The Nevers, I should mention that the violence and graphic sexual content may be a barrier for some viewers.

     Late addition: I just saw that Showtime has posted a small teaser trailer for the return of Dexter, with a 9th season (the show wrapped with its 8th back in 2013) debuting sometime this fall.

     Unlike many of the fans, I was fine with the final episode - it was the natural progression (regression?) that Dexter was going through, with the loss of Deb and his shutting down first the inner dialogue with his adoptive father, Harry, and then his own inner monologue. It was the seemingly final unravelling of the fake it till you're human experiment begun by his father, which Dexter had ramped up over the course of most of the series.

     What bothered me was what a mess most of that last season was -- ridiculous escapes that had me half-expecting an An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge style type ending that would have revealed he'd been taken down much earlier, and imagined the rest of it in his final moments of life.
     I'm interested in seeing this new chapter, and will likely work a controlled rewatch of the series between now and... whenever this arrives.

     Nearly the rest of this week's piece involved my chronological rewatch of the Netflix Marvel series, so continue reading or skip to the end as best suits you.
     The rewatch has continued, as I completed the first season of Jessica Jones - which remained solid - and have since rolled into Daredevil's second season. This is the season where he's cruising along with an established reputation and costumed image (the 13-episode first season was largely about getting

him there), and we have the introduction of Frank Castle, a hyper-violent, military-style vigilante the media tag as The Punisher. Jon Bernthal, the writers and director do such a wonderful and sympathetic job interpreting the character that it's little surprise that Bernthol went on to have two solo seasons... but that's later.
     It's in this second season of Daredevil that we start to detect some wobble in the 13-episode season format these Netflix shows started out with. While the first seasons of Daredevil and Jessica Jones each dealt with multiple character introductions and several subplots, they each did so in a fashion that kept them coherent and cohesive. In this second season of Daredevil, however, we start to have competing storylines that wrestle the attention away from each other. While the first four episodes revolve around the Punisher, episode five introduces another character, one that's become a huge element in DD's history since the '80s, and whose name was only casually dropped during the first season. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - it's oddly more realistic that parallel crises would be coming up, rather than having one, discreet problem arise and be resolved before the next one rears its head. It's mostly in the handling. The real problem for me so far is that in the sixth episode of this season, their desire to move another plot element along leads to a horribly clumsy, inept series of actions and inactions at a gala event essentially thrown at Big Evil corporate H.Q. (okay, that's not the name used, but it's comics-familiar big business baddie ROXXON), with security overseen by the Yakuza (the Japanese mafia), and it's difficult to imagine them being more conveniently inept at it than they are. The Mission Impossible style hokum summoned for the intrepid duo to accomplish their mission and walk out the front door with a conveniently semi-encoded ledger of both criminal and Super Evil plot elements is insultingly bad, and marks the first, big stumble. It's sad, as they were going so well up to that point.
     Fortunately, with the ledger in hand, it's a critical plot element checked off, allowing that plot to advance. Best not to think about it any more, as it recovers nicely after that for this season. There's still much goodness ahead in the Punisher storyline, and even in the one connected to the Yakuza, ROXXON and the ledger, as that plays into a great deal of what's to come.

      That's as much as I have time for this week, and likely much more than what even the kindest of blog readers had to spare.
     Hard to believe we're on the last crumbs of April. I managed my second Pfizer dose this past Wednesday, so that was a welcome milestone. I hope this finds you well, and getting the protections you need.  -- Mike