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pedanther. Over at Mark Watches, Mark is watching Babylon 5, and is now up to the fourth season. I've been watching along, and it's the first time I've actually kept up with a Mark Watches project this long without falling far behind or just plain giving up.
I haven't seen Babylon 5 all the way through since it first aired; I've tried watching it on DVD a couple of times but without someone to keep pace with I always got bogged down in the first or second season. Strictly speaking, this will be the first time I've seen Babylon 5 all the way through, since I missed the occasional episode here and there, not to mention a large chunk around the middle due to moving to another city and other disruptions. I'd thought of it as being "most of the third season", but I realised on this watch, as I started up the first episode of the third season and beheld an entirely unfamiliar title sequence, that in fact I missed the third season entirely. I'm glad I got to make its acquaintance at last; it's the season where the show really hits its stride, and most of the episodes are phenomenal. (Most of the episodes. "Grey 17 Is Missing"... might have passed muster as a first season episode.)
We're nearly up to the point where I started watching again, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the episodes I remember hold up.
. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a really fun movie, visually inventive and with a lot of heart. It's the most successfully comic-book-y comic-book movie I've seen in a long time, and I hope it inspires more animated comic-book movies that are taken seriously as more than just quick things for kids and/or home video. I'd happily watch another movie by the same team with Miles Morales front and centre again, or one with Gwen Stacey as the lead character instead. (Nothing against the three more out-there supporting Spider-People, but it's harder to imagine what a movie featuring one of them would even look like. And Peter... well, we know what a movie featuring him would look like because we've seen it plenty of times already, as this movie acknowledges.)
. The fashionable thing to say about Bumblebee is that it's a better "teenager's first car turns out to be the undercover Autobot Bumblebee" movie than the one Michael Bay made ten years ago, and this is of course true while also being (and I say this as somebody who quite liked that one) not a high bar to clear. I was amused that Bay's movie had characters as complex and three-dimensional as the Saturday morning cartoon from which the series sprang, but I have to admit that having real characters is an improvement. So is the lack of gratuitous toilet humour. I enjoyed it, but it left me feeling a bit dissatisfied; there are some plot-structural oddities and bits that didn't quite work for me. If Bumblebee does well it will presumably influence the shape of future Transformers movies (the existence of which are probably inevitable at this point), but I'm not sure how much of a useful model it actually provides; it works because it keeps most of the giant robots offstage and focuses on the relationship between the girl and her car, and while America knows several other A Person And Their Car stories to tell now that "teenager's first car" has been done properly, there are only so many variations on that theme you can do before you have to find something for the rest of the robots to do.
. There happened to be reruns of Sherlock on in approximately the timeslot when I would usually be watching Doctor Who with friends, and said friends decided they wanted to watch, so I have now seen the last couple of episodes. I am reassured that I made the right choice losing interest in Sherlock when I did, and that I correctly judged that the series I wanted it to be and believed it was capable of becoming was not the series it was interested in being. It's nice to see the visual effects team are still having fun with it, and I did appreciate the moment where Mrs Holmes casually remarked in front of Mycroft that she'd always considered Sherlock the grown-up one.
. This post has been languishing in draft for a while because I thought I'd better watch the Doctor Who holiday special before I made any final pronouncements on the first season under Chibnall, and then it took me nearly a week to summon up enough enthusiasm to click the play button. Which gives you the short version, right there: I am not enthused about Chibnall's version of Doctor Who.
I want to say that I don't blame Jodi Whittaker for this at all; she does a great version of the Doctor right out of the gate. And, which shouldn't surprise anybody who knows me but needs stating given the way some of the fanbase has been carrying on, I don't have a problem with the show making moves toward diversity and inclusion, only that some of those moves were half-hearted or clumsy.
In the classic era, one of the Who fan shibboleths was that a Real Fan would never call it a children's show; it was a family show, meaning that grown-ups and children could watch it together and both get something out of it. Chibnall's Who, with the exception of a couple of episodes, is definitely a children's show, and it's the kind of children's show you get from writers who think that writing for children means you don't have to try as hard.
(Something I've been dwelling on is that it's also the kind of children's adventure show where guns are clean and tidy and shooting someone in the leg by accident is a hilarious joke and not a major trauma that the victim will be affected by for a very long time if they don't immediately bleed to death, which makes Chibnall's attempts to write The Doctor Doesn't Like Guns come off somewhat incoherently.)
I hope there are people enjoying it for what it is. Me, I'll be over here contemplating the fact that, for the first time in about three decades, it no longer seems obvious that I'm going to watch the next episode of Doctor Who.
I haven't seen Babylon 5 all the way through since it first aired; I've tried watching it on DVD a couple of times but without someone to keep pace with I always got bogged down in the first or second season. Strictly speaking, this will be the first time I've seen Babylon 5 all the way through, since I missed the occasional episode here and there, not to mention a large chunk around the middle due to moving to another city and other disruptions. I'd thought of it as being "most of the third season", but I realised on this watch, as I started up the first episode of the third season and beheld an entirely unfamiliar title sequence, that in fact I missed the third season entirely. I'm glad I got to make its acquaintance at last; it's the season where the show really hits its stride, and most of the episodes are phenomenal. (Most of the episodes. "Grey 17 Is Missing"... might have passed muster as a first season episode.)
We're nearly up to the point where I started watching again, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the episodes I remember hold up.
. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a really fun movie, visually inventive and with a lot of heart. It's the most successfully comic-book-y comic-book movie I've seen in a long time, and I hope it inspires more animated comic-book movies that are taken seriously as more than just quick things for kids and/or home video. I'd happily watch another movie by the same team with Miles Morales front and centre again, or one with Gwen Stacey as the lead character instead. (Nothing against the three more out-there supporting Spider-People, but it's harder to imagine what a movie featuring one of them would even look like. And Peter... well, we know what a movie featuring him would look like because we've seen it plenty of times already, as this movie acknowledges.)
. The fashionable thing to say about Bumblebee is that it's a better "teenager's first car turns out to be the undercover Autobot Bumblebee" movie than the one Michael Bay made ten years ago, and this is of course true while also being (and I say this as somebody who quite liked that one) not a high bar to clear. I was amused that Bay's movie had characters as complex and three-dimensional as the Saturday morning cartoon from which the series sprang, but I have to admit that having real characters is an improvement. So is the lack of gratuitous toilet humour. I enjoyed it, but it left me feeling a bit dissatisfied; there are some plot-structural oddities and bits that didn't quite work for me. If Bumblebee does well it will presumably influence the shape of future Transformers movies (the existence of which are probably inevitable at this point), but I'm not sure how much of a useful model it actually provides; it works because it keeps most of the giant robots offstage and focuses on the relationship between the girl and her car, and while America knows several other A Person And Their Car stories to tell now that "teenager's first car" has been done properly, there are only so many variations on that theme you can do before you have to find something for the rest of the robots to do.
. There happened to be reruns of Sherlock on in approximately the timeslot when I would usually be watching Doctor Who with friends, and said friends decided they wanted to watch, so I have now seen the last couple of episodes. I am reassured that I made the right choice losing interest in Sherlock when I did, and that I correctly judged that the series I wanted it to be and believed it was capable of becoming was not the series it was interested in being. It's nice to see the visual effects team are still having fun with it, and I did appreciate the moment where Mrs Holmes casually remarked in front of Mycroft that she'd always considered Sherlock the grown-up one.
. This post has been languishing in draft for a while because I thought I'd better watch the Doctor Who holiday special before I made any final pronouncements on the first season under Chibnall, and then it took me nearly a week to summon up enough enthusiasm to click the play button. Which gives you the short version, right there: I am not enthused about Chibnall's version of Doctor Who.
I want to say that I don't blame Jodi Whittaker for this at all; she does a great version of the Doctor right out of the gate. And, which shouldn't surprise anybody who knows me but needs stating given the way some of the fanbase has been carrying on, I don't have a problem with the show making moves toward diversity and inclusion, only that some of those moves were half-hearted or clumsy.
In the classic era, one of the Who fan shibboleths was that a Real Fan would never call it a children's show; it was a family show, meaning that grown-ups and children could watch it together and both get something out of it. Chibnall's Who, with the exception of a couple of episodes, is definitely a children's show, and it's the kind of children's show you get from writers who think that writing for children means you don't have to try as hard.
(Something I've been dwelling on is that it's also the kind of children's adventure show where guns are clean and tidy and shooting someone in the leg by accident is a hilarious joke and not a major trauma that the victim will be affected by for a very long time if they don't immediately bleed to death, which makes Chibnall's attempts to write The Doctor Doesn't Like Guns come off somewhat incoherently.)
I hope there are people enjoying it for what it is. Me, I'll be over here contemplating the fact that, for the first time in about three decades, it no longer seems obvious that I'm going to watch the next episode of Doctor Who.
