Sulphur on 19/4/2019 at 08:06
There's also been a couple of Alien 40th anniversary shorts put out recently. This one's quite clever while homaging the movie's tone and themes.
[video=youtube;wKl-fU3WC7s]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKl-fU3WC7s[/video]
Sulphur on 19/4/2019 at 21:24
It was always going to have to account for its anomalous technologies and plot points at some point, and I suppose there's at least a few more hoary ways to wrap things up than chucking the whole shebang into ye ol' singularity in space-time.
But overall: ugh. What a waste. A season born out of chaos, carried by good intentions, wrecked by mediocre execution. It's the loosest show in the franchise's existence, and we already had S1 of TNG and all of Enterprise. I enjoyed Mount's rendition of Captain Pike, and Michelle Yeoh's character was always fun to watch because even if her motivations never made sense, she clearly had fun embodying the playful chaos of it.
But outside of those things that I liked, here are just some of the things the writers fucked up on: gay partner dealing with PTSD? Resolved through a magical last-minute crisis bandage. Sudden crew member death? Spend half an episode making up a backstory when for an entire one and 3/4ths of a season she was relegated to the background and second-long shots acknowledging her existence. Sudden appearance of weird time-altering technology? Throw in an unexpected character appearance, drop technobabble for thaumaturgy (time crystals! ahahahaha! TIME CRYSTALS! :joke:), have the entire plot hinge on it, then go silent on the fact that an established race of war-loving aliens has access to knowing the future and does bugger-all with it in the pre-established chronology of the show's universe. Need a galaxy-ending crisis? Go with an AI trying to achieve sentience (thus posing an interesting catch-22: would it not have needed to be sentient to want to achieve sentience?), which is of course inherently evil, despite the fact that y'know, this show's set 200+ years into the future and any problems we were going to have with AIs would certainly have come to pass between now and then.
Then: throw in a couple of curses here and there to shake things up, do next to no character development for the people who need it (Stamets never moves beyond being a blond-haired rubber face-mask that's a walking plot point, Tilly shows no signs of maturity but is progressively more shrill as a character, Spock's entire arc can be summarised by, 'How I lost my beard', Tyler pinballs between Discovery, Section 31, and the Klingons and even makes an appearance on the Chancellor's warship for some chest-thumping despite the fact that all Klingons think he's dead and would kill him on sight if they knew he was alive), then throw in the kitchen sink while leaving no clear trajectory for Burnham except lampshading her penchant for self-sacrifice as a character flaw over and over through speeches from other characters, then getting the entire crew to go along with her for no reason except to prove that they're all suicidal idiots and the writers would have needed S3 to not be a non-starter.
Oh, and an entire penultimate episode wasted most of its runtime on redundant goodbye speeches. Did we really need nearly an hour of mincing melodrama?
At least there's one thing we know so far: they've got a pretty decent VFX team that can do large space battles with a degree of finesse. I giggled a bit at the laser beams flying back and forth like oversized neon toothpicks that were bigger than the ships firing them, but I can understand they probably did that so the weapons fire stood out when the camera pulled back to observe the battle at a distance.
Also, ending it on that note took balls. I'll give them that. We have no idea where the show's headed after this, and that's the single most exciting thing it's done in two seasons of messy, whole-cloth reframing of the franchise it spent so much time fucking around with to no real end. For all its ambitions, it's been two seasons of the creators' reach exceeding their grasp, more often than not resulting in something that was aggressively mediocre. Here's hoping the third season retains the aggressiveness, but loses the mediocrity.
twisty on 20/4/2019 at 01:28
Quote Posted by Tocky
I have been hooked on Youtube's Dust sci fi shorts lately.
That was great.
On a similar note, I've also been enjoying the new Scyfi shorts on Netflix,
Love, Death & Robots. They also range somewhere between 5 and 15 minutes and many of them have a lasting impact.
Pyrian on 20/4/2019 at 06:42
A friend got me hooked on (
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHsRtomD4twRf5WVHHk-cMw) Tier Zoo, a show that describes real-world animals in gaming terms, and it is
fabulous. Biomes are "servers", each animal gets stat lines and special abilities, evolution is described as players evolving their builds in the metagame, and they get carefully assigned to "power level tiers".
Recent titles:
"Are Snakes Viable? Optimizing the snake build."
"Earth's Next Balance Patch"
"Should Dinosaurs Be Unbanned?"
"How Humans Broke the Game"
froghawk on 27/4/2019 at 19:48
Yeah, it was a fitting ending but I found a lot of the first 2/3 to be pretty tedious and too mired in sentimental nostalgia. Slow and weighty isnt a great look for those films.
Renzatic on 29/4/2019 at 07:20
I have mixed feelings about tonight's Game of Thrones episode. To put this as non-spoilery as possible, I can't help but think that tonight's threat would've been better served as the climax for the penultimate episode, with the now remaining threat being the one that was taken care of first.
demagogue on 29/4/2019 at 10:36
The show is called "Game of Thrones", meng. The actual game of thrones, who gets to sit on the Iron Throne, has to be the climax.
PigLick on 29/4/2019 at 10:44
Am I the only person on this earth who has only read the books and never watched the series?
Starker on 29/4/2019 at 14:21
I tried to watch GoT, but stopped after season 3 when I realised it's going to be focused more on T&A and SHOCKING PLOT TWISTS than characters and worldbuilding. Plus I heard it's gone off the rails quite a bit more since season 3, so I'm not keen on picking it up again.
froghawk on 29/4/2019 at 16:27
Yeah, it went majorly downhill after season 3. I saw the first 7 but I haven't managed to convince myself to start this last one even though it's the finale since I really didn't enjoy the last 4 seasons at all. I only watched the last one because I was forced to.