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Post by Jay on Jun 18, 2017 10:43:29 GMT -8
I don't know if it's really going to be anyone contributing beyond Bosquiara and myself, but the show still holds a bit of a place in CT lore as being the first active show promoted hereabouts and it's in its final season. We may as well have some fun with the last run of it.
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Post by Jay on Jun 18, 2017 11:19:15 GMT -8
I probably mentioned before that M and I both watch this although she isn't caught up and I'm pacing a week behind on purpose. We'll see.
S5Ep1 "The Few Who Dare"
"I forget what's supposed to be happening in this show. Kira is the Baby Jesus and she keeps being kidnapped by Cruella de Vil right? "Bear in mind that if the show went any longer I might just nihilistically embrace the Allison sequences. 'I don't care anymore. We deserve this. We all deserve this.'" "That flashback to last season was straight up soap operatic" "Also this is a straight jump from last season's finale which is more disjunctive for me than Helena's Soviet Baby Shower" "We may also be on the Island of Doctor Moreau" "So, the girl with the pigtails will henceforth be Miley Cyrus to me" "Maybe Miley is the villain this season who knows" "Something about the circumstances of the island remind me of RE4 and I'm waiting for a Napoleon type to show up or for Rachel to don a hooded purple robe" "That said it could purely be that it's always washed out autumn in Canada" "Delphine is in a hippie refugee camp and her hair is still on point" "So uh they're reaching out to the notoriously skittish MK by posting however many social media cites and I think that's actually a way to drive her back into her cave" "I feel like this season could end up as mostly arc. Or rather, it's hard to imagine this season ending up with a wacky subplot just because they don't fit anymore" ""La campala!" "Lord Saddler"" "Donnie has been a joy this episode" "'Whatever this place is, it's the answer' there's a line that could fit in any of this show's seasons"
It's a bold although probably necessary choice for the show to pick up where the finale of season four dropped us, although in my immediate watching of it, I had forgotten so many details of the climax that I felt like I had a poor grip on what was happening. I couldn't tell you what Siobhan was up to and I couldn't tell you how the Hendrixes escaped police custody. The comments that follow could end up being way off base because I'm forgetting certain details. I would have done better to read episode summaries before diving back into it, but then I had anticipated an easier opener to get my footing in.
One thing I was thinking about as I was watching this show is how I'm not totally sure when this show is as it seems like there are competing elements: Genetic manipulation is talked about enough to have a cult around Dr. Leaky and that one dude had a tail, because, but we're still dealing with conventions like cell phones running out of juice and Kira's fondness for Minecraft. Sometimes, it feels as if they're picking and choosing elements to play around with the plot and I'm not sure how effective it is overall. It feels like a nitpick, but then so much seems to hinge on Neolution having its tendrils in everything, such that when Art's new partner is introduced, you think immediately "okay, she's a plant," and while they do us the good grace of having her out her allegiances almost immediately, I was stuck wondering what Neolution has to blackmail the cops or what the cops may want from Neolution that they can't get elsewhere given that the whole thing is sort of cult-ish anyway and one would imagine they have the requisite training to recognize such things. It also seems like in order for Neolution to have the clout to blackmail people, they would have to be involved in something other than genetic engineering as it seems like they're trying to create a new kind of order while having the resources to already be that enforcer for many. Perhaps some of this can be revealed over the course of this season given that they supposedly date back to the Victorian era of which the only good thing to come was really the novels.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jun 18, 2017 15:50:14 GMT -8
For all its faults, S3 had a stellar first three minutes. Damn if I remember what happened last year!
I personally like the gap between the futuristic technology available to the conspiracy and the mundane, crappy technology available to our protagonists (sans MK). The show does have the slight problem where I'm not quite sure what year it is?
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jun 20, 2017 7:27:31 GMT -8
OoOoOoOF, "Clutch of Greed"
I suppose you could consider it "manipulative" but it really worked for me. Wildly disrespectful to MK as a character but that's kind of the point, and entirely in keeping with the thesis of the show. A stunner of a scene, even if it was a little contrived.
I also think giving Kira agency is a very smart way to introduce on-theme conflict. Girl doesn't wanna be a latchkey kid! She likes interacting with kids her age, and her sexy homeroom teacher (seriously he's distractingly hot), and not being on the run from shadowy multinational corporations.
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Post by Jay on Jun 25, 2017 14:20:40 GMT -8
S5Ep2 "Clutch of Greed"
J: "Anyway, I'm probably going to go watch James Frain kick ass and chew scenery and there's still plenty of scenery left." J: "Is this season gonna be all about the Kira hallucination?" J: "Rather feels like a lot is happening at once?" J: "Oh fuck Zen Rachel, all in white" J: ""Shove it up your bleached ass" "... regularly scheduled..." ASS BLEACHINGS?" J: "*everything is different now* /Lazy Writer Multiplier Active" J: "Allison has been kicked off of the sock hop planning committee" J: "The great thing about Art's new partner is that we've never heard of her before and she's big awful to everyone" J: "Waiting for a Thelma and Louise style spinoff where Allison and Helena are on the lam" J: ""This time you're going out the front door with your daughter by your hand" oh we are not doing another wig disguise are we" J: "I can't imagine Felix punching someone in the nose. That was weird advice" J: "CLONE PHONES" J: ""sick for a long time now" given that it's perpetual fall?" J: "You can tell PT is old because he listens to a phonograph totally analog what a loser" J: "Arthur Conan Doyle pfft" J: "So, PT is a cross between the early 90s Gary Oldman Dracula and, I don't know, Rhett Butler?" M: "That's what I thought!! I didn't know ol pt was supposed to be Faulkner's vampire but here we are" M: "Also yes, fuuuuuuck zen Rachel, who not a few days ago was stabby mcwhackstick on her mom and sisterclone" J: "And she's going to have tantric sex with Ferdinand now or something" M: "Apparently, she went from Daniel to Paul to ferdy in like six months. The hussy" J: "Well it's not like she can get preggers" J: "Ferdinand ain't into tantric sex he's gonna go kill someone" M: "If I had that bod and no bebbies hell yeah" J "Okay how many times has a one-way ticket come up as a plot point now? Or a wig?" M: "Right? We've done this how many times and Rachel always wins" M: "And we knew she'd be in a cape!" J: "Well, it's not a fooking Tuesday, so capes are a-OK" {Director's Commentary: This is a reference to the time Noel Fielding was called out by one of the Oasis brothers for wearing a cape on a Tuesday.} J: "Someone got caught by a hall monitor!" M: "#debbietried" M: "Haha oh noel" J: "Helena will never escape in a stealthy manner. Stealth is not her thing" J: "MK ignores the lock, tosses in the screwdriver. 'kay" M: "Helena crashes out like a dainty Ukrainian rhino" J: "They even flipped back to that shot and had the lock, sitting there, next to the less sturdy screwdriver, where the lock should be" M: "They were trying to get it over with, I assume. Tat had a movie to make" J: "So one fewer clone to play?" J: "MK is going to a farm upstate where she gets to run and play forever" J: "Gosh. I think the ol' ribcage stomp is a new one for me" J: "Bye Bjork" J: "Petulant child plot points!" M: "Told ya he was on fiiiiiiiiah" M: "Mk was never used to full potential, just throw her to Frain, walk away" J: "Everybody stealing everybody else's babies or else they running for PTA board and getting their social standing wrecked we sure this isn't a soap opera?" M: "......Resident Evil soap opera with clones" J: "oh, I don't know, needs more zambies." M: "Alison's mother is undead enough for meeeeee" J: "*points awarded* not that we see her much. soap baroness that she is."
I'm short of time and would rather think about something else than analyze this in too much depth so let's point out that there are few persistent threats post Leakie getting shot and everything's compartmentalized within a season and they announce the fact that they don't care about continuity with the whole "everything's different now and we know why but we're not going to explain why." Five seasons of wacky disguises! If I didn't like the actors so much I maybe wouldn't watch anymore.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jun 25, 2017 14:47:48 GMT -8
Oh gosh, you're going to love "Beneath Her Heart" which doubles down on your favorite part of the show!!
(It was actually pretty good and surprisingly poignant, I M O)
Anyway Jay, the most important question: Kira's homeroom teacher, would bang y/y???
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Post by Jay on Jun 25, 2017 23:53:17 GMT -8
I'm guessing that means I'm in for an episode of Hendrix Hijinx. Blerg.
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Post by buffyholic on Jul 1, 2017 1:29:24 GMT -8
3 episodes until I finish season four.
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Post by Jay on Jul 9, 2017 11:23:17 GMT -8
S5Ep3 "Beneath Her Heart"
"I keep forgetting all the weird Desperate Housewives shit that happens in the Allison storyline because everyone else does too. Like, here's an Ainsley flashback. Remember her? Me neither" "Also Ainsley's husband is a Ken doll. Forgot that too. Or an even more preppy Fred Jones from Scooby Doo, hard to say." "Allison majored in P.E." "Donnie as the one sober guy at the party is pretty good" "Also that they had any sort of memorial for MK was more than I expected?" "Suburbanite passive aggression and competition and ugh" "Do an evil thing, get talked to by a guy with a collar, bail on evil thing doing, okay" "Oh dad widower has the sadness beard" "So, inebriated person speaking innermost thoughts is a television trope. Plus flashbacks fleshing out dead character. It's kinda lazy. Also children being naive as a plot point" "It's also weird to have characters refer back to specific objective time spans like years while having no sense of how much time is passing internally" "This is the first time I can remember being lukewarm on a bouncy castle" "Pretty cool how Art's new partner is thorough and competent despite having no specific incentive to be so" "Relapse. Deep cuts from the writer's room" "Sitcom logic ahoy. Big man fall down. Make laughs. Ken doll disappointed" "I saw Ainsley in the light and just did a spit take" "Big man puke in bucket make funny" "GARE-age (Which makes sense if you know French)" "Also cop lady rather miffed about Hendrix clan getting off but lacks any kind of investment in outcome. Super." "Finale kind of hits right notes, I imagine someone has translated Helena's Russian scribbling"
So, I had a couple of weeks to sit with the prospect of this episode because Comcast is chumps and wouldn't square it away so that I could access it. Mostly, my attitude was "let's get this over with," but even if it was revisionist history on a lot of fronts and relied on flashbacks to give us information we never had in the moment (and drugs lol Mikejer would hate this episode), it ended up being kind of successful in that it gave us something to hold on to and presented Allison's rapid-fire PTA Soccer Mom quests as being partially fueled by feelings of inferiority to the other clones for having lives and careers while she was defined by her neighborhood. It sort of works. If I were to push suggestions beyond "you should have done this earlier," I think that something with deeper reflection could have been useful, either going back to her mother or her high school days which as I remember were marked with high achievement but also some drug use. Something that was a little bit more to the "how did we get to be here" point without bringing in wholly new information we would have had no previous inkling of. But particularly in a final season where storylines ought to be wrapped up, they did well to try to bring it back to earlier material to give a sense of closure. Not a perfect episode, but it had an objective and it got close enough to its goal.
Looking forward to a future episode where, now that Rachel has Leakie's skull, she starts to soliloquize to it.
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Post by Jay on Jul 16, 2017 14:27:55 GMT -8
S5Ep4 " "Let the Children & the Childbearers Toil""
"Will Cosima escape the Island of Doctor Moreau or will our plucky, bespectacled, bedredlocked heroine become The Bride of Manbearpig?" "Did Mud Cyrus get her name by losing an "or my name is mud" style bet? Inquiring minds" ""I'm not dead, why?" Wouldn't we like to know?" "What's outside the village? Betting on a RE4 regenerator" "So uh is Rachel trying to be the overcompensating post-divorce parent who tries to buy up Kira's affection? Also will we ever see her dad again? Who knows!" "In Sarah's defense here, PT Westmoreland is about and the Victorians fucking loved vivisection" "Okay big ups for them actually name checking Moreau. Although the incessant "we can't tell you because you're an Outsider" is a frequent trope here" "Because this show is in Canada we are not supposed to be surprised that Kira at her age receives instruction in a foreign language" "I had hoped the Ripley reference was either The Talented Mr. or Aliens or Believe it or Not! but I guess we wait and see" "Helena got her to a nunnery" "Maybe I am not remembering properly but the cynical side of me wants to say we never knew outside of her orthodox background that Helena was running off to a convent" "This series will feature more of Felix's sister than Tony" "Kira is cutting herself Teenagers Am I Right?" "Maybe it's the eugenics thing but I'm wondering if Westmoreland founded his colony with the idea of a population inbreeding and producing interesting results" "And they do the make-up to hide the scars, as Sarah and Siobhan, in RE4 parlance, press A to "Infiltrate"" "I for one am astonished that Coady has become relevant again and that her attached IV is not full of cigarette butts and brown liquor" "Okay so Westmoreland hooked up to a steampunk dialysis machine makes me think that in a perfect world, he's played by Keith Richards" "Maybe I just personally loathe the "guess what I'm holding in my hand" style of Q&A but why bother with Sarah and S guessing at who set up Coady? Why not just come out with it?" "Okay so Manbearpig is more or less Lisa Trevor from the RE remake" "My favorite thing about the between scenes commercial self-promotion "The smartest show on Television returns" - The Guardian "You expect us to believe that?" - Felix" "Wait did we just find out that Westmoreland's first name is Percival" ""Let's trust S now" "But I have an art show, I can't go to Switzerland"" "Westmoreland loves port. I do like the small touches" "So we have threads from seasons three through five active which is, not awful"
Yeah, I don't really have any huge complaints about this one, I'm really happy that we're starting to see return cameos from previous seasons but I've been led astray before by this show.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jul 16, 2017 15:34:05 GMT -8
Man, just wait until you see THE RETURN OF KRYSTAL
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Post by Jay on Jul 16, 2017 21:08:29 GMT -8
I am excited for that! I know Krystal is a type insofar as she's the sort of coiffeuse who is one crisis away from touting the virtues of healing crystals to all of her patrons, but she at least is committed to the cause and wants to be involved, which is more than we can say for Allison much of the time.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jul 22, 2017 19:17:54 GMT -8
So, episode seven (Gag or Throttle) was genuinely fantastic: deliberate, thematically coherent, and with a suitably horrifying denouement.
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Post by Jay on Jul 25, 2017 14:44:27 GMT -8
I heard good things! I am hopeful! We'll see how misguided that is but in the meantime....
S5Ep5 "Ease for Idle Millionaires"
"Okay now Orphan Black and Cos Cosplay. Much as I like Cos I think the show probably would have benefited from a main clone dying. On the other hand if Cos was killed we would have had the dead lesbian trope" "Smoking kills, dude in the woods." "Also didn't we already... Is this a flashback or something happening now... Didn't Cos know about the binary and the copyright" "Oh it was a flashback I guess we'll that was awkward" "Also Revival sure is multicultural. Wait a second Westmoreland is a White Savior!" "Also my favorite thing about Manbearpig is that Westmoreland just released it and it picks off ganados at random but otherwise no one cares. Typical Resident Evil villain" "Hormones, surrogates, Westmoreland faking out Rachel by trying to be her real dad" "Lol Allison got called a crone" "Everybody has to head to a foreign country to excuse their absences from future episodes" "'I've hidden the knives', Ira with the sass" ""Once this show is over I am going to miss Tatyana Maslany being several different people" "Kinda surprised that the spiny mouse is an actual thing" "The plant of "is this actually Westmoreland or just some random" was... Somewhat unexpected. I kind of expected to take it for granted that he was ancient" "So, the balding Russian sort of fellow with the glasses, why was he the one to appear in Rachel's swan hallucinations" ""Dress or leave" cosplay incoming" ""Frock that" This is great" "For dinner, roast Manbearpig" "They're pissing over Darwin!" ""How are your parents who have almost never been mentioned or seen?" (groan)" "Further exposition is more groan" "Cancer versus healthy cell replication eh makes sense but" "The bell has rung and gosh everyone is edgy I mean it's just Lord Saddler" "Ah right Geneva and Felix... (groans again)" "Here are two juxtaposed flashbacks where Delphine has good but slightly different hair" "Latvian orphanage, okay, had trouble processing accent" "Hhhheritable" "Aw poor Ira here comes Mark with the spinoff" "Sure set aside the gun so that PT can use it. That was telegraphed" "Now that I'm accustomed to it post season two, S with a gun makes my heart soar" "Questions about sources!" "Oh god children's choir end end end" M: "I could have done with a show abt Mrs S grifting people with her wayward orphans" "which occasionally ends up with guns and karaoke and such because why not"
RIP Manbearpig you were slightly less relevant than Kendall Malone. Uh, where were we? I forgot to post this the next morning so I'm not totally clear on the thoughts I was having. My initial impressions were that the episode was fine but I had some misgivings about us suddenly learning about Cos' family four and half seasons in. Girl's been given the short end of the stick a number of times including having a paramilitary lesbian lover who disappeared after one season. I mean, we knew more about Donny for a long time than we did about her. Still do, actually.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jul 29, 2017 19:25:56 GMT -8
I enjoyed episode eight, although watching it gave me the distinct impression that the Undertale Prime guy was onto something.
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