Sticking The Ending (Not Saying Where)

One of the beneficial side-effects of the recent heatwave was that I managed to catch up with some TV-watching, while I was downstairs keeping Beryl company. I finished the current (Fourth.) season of The Legend of Vox Machina and I finally got around to the final (Third) season of Good Omens. 

They didn't have much in common other than that I wasn't one hundred per cent happy with the ending of either but since I can still just about remember what happened in each of them, I'm going to wodge the pair into this one post anyway.

There will inevitably be some spoilers so now's your chance to bail. 

Here, I'll stick in one of the trailers as a buffer, just in case.

The Legend of Vox Machina - Season 4

I'm starting to realize I've been watching this one wrong. I didn't even realize it was the people from Critical Role until sometime in Season 2 and even when I did, it didn't mean much to me since all I know about them is what I've read on blogs. Then, yesterday at work, someone ordered a couple of the graphic novel collections and I had a flip through one when I took it off the shelf, which was when it occurred to me the TV show presumably has greater resonance if you're already immersed in the backstory, of which there appears to be plenty.

I probably should have taken the time to watch at least a few episodes of the original YouTube series as soon as I figured out that was where the TV series came from but I never even thought of it until a few days ago. I guess I could start now. It's still there. I just checked.

Maybe I'll get round to it before Season 5 but for now I'm just going to have to treat the TV show as a stand-alone cartoon. And it is a cartoon, I guess, although we don't seem to use the term so much any more. It's not anime, that's for sure, even if you allow that anime can be made anywhere outside Japan.

The trouble is, I'm so used to watching anime now that regular cartoons can look slightly off, somehow, at least until I reacclimatize. The animation in Vox Machina S3 started out looking thin and flat to me so it didn't help that Amazon decided to spit it out in three episode chunks every Wednesday. I'd just get used to the storybook graphics and then I'd have to start all over again the following week.

What made it really awkward, though, were the commercials. Or, I should say, the placement of the ad breaks. I can handle ads in shows if the shows themselves have been created with specific narrative breaks designed to hold them, as used to be the norm with commercial television, at least in this country. It's harder to put up with the constant interruption, when the damn ads pop up seemingly randomly.

I complained about this last time I wrote about a Prime show, so I don't want to make this all about the ads again but damn! Just have set breaks FFS! It's not like I watch the ads anyway. If I'm watching on the laptop I tab out and read a blog or something but last week, when I was on the sofa in front of the TV, I literally brought a book. I went and got one when the ads started and from then on I muted the sound and read until until the ads went away.

Enough about the presentation. What about the content?

Confusing is the first word that comes to mind. There was a basic problem in that I couldn't remember much about the last series. I thought the recap at the start would help with that but it didn't, or not much. As the episodes went by I gradually remembered enough to figure out what was happening but it doesn't say a lot for Season 3 that all those dragons had completely faded from memory.

I remembered all the characters, though, and that's really 90% of the appeal of the show. You just wait for them to come on and do their schtick. It still worked to some extent but we seem to have hit the point where only bad things happen and everyone's either depressed or angry or despairing or all three at once, which somewhat limits the opportunities for merriment. In my opinion that doesn't make for great entertainment.

As always there's a world-threatening crisis but this time half the team wants nothing to do with averting it. Everyone's at odds with someone or having some kind of existential breakdown and it's all quite tiring, if not tiresome. 

Since most of the cast aren't making with the snappy one-liners and the class clown isn't even in most of the episodes at all, we get a new character who gets to do all the jokes all the time. He's incredibly annoying to begin with but of course there turns out to be More To Him Than We Thought. I did end up quite liking him but I also felt I'd been maneuvered into it, which is never ideal.

The plot ticks along nicely enough although parts of it never seem to make much sense until eventually it reaches what passes for a feel-good ending, at least in context of what's happened before... and then the writers pull the rug out from under it so fast the audience get carpet burns. 

Would a happy ending be too much to ask for? Yes, obviously it would.  

Here's the thing. If I wanted a bleak, miserable, downbeat animated show, one that would make me wonder why I'd bothered putting myself through the emotional wringer in the first place, if that was all the catharsis I was going to get, I could just go watch Bojak Horseman again. At least that way I'd be watching something that had earned the right to make me feel emotionally roughed-up, not some half-assed D&D nonsense with dueling heavy-metal guitar solos and characters who never stay dead.

I guess now I have to watch Season 5, just to see how in hell they pull themselves out of the mess they've gotten into, although right now I'd have to say that looks pretty much impossible. Then again, as I just said, no-one ever stays dead for long in this show so I expect they'll manage somehow.

Let's just hope Amazon doesn't kill off the show itself before we get a resolution. Not that I could really blame them if they did. It's starting to look like one of those shows that's already gone on a bit too long.

Good Omens - Season 3

 

I say "Season" because that's what Amazon called it. It's one episode. Can one episode be a season? I wouldn't have thought so, no matter how long it is. 

This one's an hour and thirty-nine minutes. The length of an old-fashioned movie. And that's what it is, pretty much: a shortish movie. Not a very good one, either.

Oh, it looks quite nice. The production values are okay and the art department seems to have done a job of work although it looks mostly as though they're using the same old sets or no sets at all. And of course the two principals are great, Tennant and Sheen, and the supporting cast, which isn't all that huge, is fine...

The plot, though...

It makes sense until close to the end although it never feels very involving. It's more of an outline of a plot than the real thing. There's a murder mystery in Heaven that seems like it could be interesting until it gets solved with no real build-up or tension. Jesus comes back for the second coming and it's all a bit Life of Brian for a few minutes but then that just stops, too. 

No-one has much of a reason for doing whatever it is they're doing. They just amble along, making the right noises about why they're doing it without ever sounding the least bit convincing or convinced. The solution to the mystery, such as it is, turns out to be that an immortal got so bored of being immortal they decided to destroy the universe so they wouldn't have to keep on being bored.

And that would be it except for the coda, which is beyond stupid. I'd call it fan service if I thought any fans were actually being served. Okay, I'm sure some were. If all you ever wanted out of the whole thing was to see David Tennant and Michael Sheen holding hands as they slip peacefully into an idyllic, comfortable retirement together, then consider yourself served.

I mean, I'm not saying that wasn't sweet but to get there, first God had to be persuaded by way of some extremely dubious arguments from the would-be happy couple to destroy the entire universe, then she had to recreate it without being in the new one herself, which is a good trick if you can do it. Then all we had to do was wait 13.8 billion years (Or maybe it was 13.4 - I didn't take notes when the caption came up.) for the Earth to somehow go through exactly the same process not just of evolution but civilization too, so the now-mortal lovers could find each other in the same fucking bookshop and fall in love all over again! 

I don't know about you but I just can't quite see that happening, somehow. It seems like there might be a logical flaw in there somewhere...

I realize I'm slating one show for having a feel-bad ending and the other for the exact opposite but the awkward truth is neither of them made me feel good. Of the two, at least Vox Machina made me feel bad because something bad happened. Good Omens just made me feel bad because the ending itself was so bad!

We all know why, of course. Naughty Neil Gaiman and his unfortunate extra-curricular activities or proclivities or whatever it is that made Jeff Bezos feel queasy enough to decide not to go ahead with the full six episode season as planned. Heaven forfend Amazon should take any reputational damage from someone's antisocial behavior!

Even so, if that was the plot they were intending to stretch out until it lasted three times as long, I'm not sure a full season would have helped. Bad things generally don't get better just because they last longer.

And come to think of it, Season 2 wasn't all that great, was it? What did I say about it? 

Hmm. It appears I thought it was "short, rushed and incomplete... quite unsatisfying at times." If that's true, then I guess Season 3 should have been a dozen episodes at least.

Really, only the first Season stands up as coherent, complete and satisfying and that's the one Terry Pratchett co-wrote. He had nothing to do with Season 2, being dead at the time, but Season 3 is partly based on a plotline he and Gaiman hashed out in a hotel room thirty-five years ago. I kind of doubt it would have stayed like that if he'd had time to work on it.

All of that said, I quite enjoyed Season 2 for all its flaws and Season 3 at least helped a hot afternoon to go by passably enough. Pretty sure the whole thing would have a better reputation if they'd just made the first season as a mini-series and left it that, though. 

Arcane Vs The Mighty Nein

Before Christmas, I watched two animated fantasy TV series. I've been meaning to write something about them both ever since but somehow the post kept getting pushed down the list. Now, when I've found a slot for it, I discover I can't remember enough about either of them to make the kind of detailed analysis I would have liked. 

Lucky break! 

I guess I'll just have to go with whatever impressions have stuck, which is probably a more reliable and useful way of appraising the long-term value of any experience. Some things are very much meant to be "in the moment" but that's often more to do with sensation than any kind of cultural or academic appreciation.

The two shows were Arcane and The Mighty Nein. Both were first seasons, although there's also a Season Two of Arcane. I just haven't watched it yet. 

Both are also spin-offs, Arcane from League of Legends and The Mighty Nein from The Legend of Vox Machina, which itself is a spin-off from Critical Role. I have never played LoL and never watched Critical Role, although I did watch Vox Machina. 

The LoL connection actively put me off watching Arcane, which is why it's taken me so long to get around to giving it a try. Conversely, since I liked Vox Machina, I was keen to start The Mighty Nein as soon as it turned up on Prime Video.

And I was very happy with it, too. At least until I started watching Arcana, half way through the run.

It's Prime's own fault for staggering the release of TM9 in such an irritating fashion. If they'd let me watch the whole season in one go, I'd never have been in a position to make unfavorable comparisons. Three episodes dropped at the start and then it was a drip-feed of one a week. It was while I was tired of waiting for the next one that I started looking for something to fill the gap. In came Arcane.

I knew Arcane had been very well received and reviewed. My friend had raved about it at the time, too, so I even had a personal recommendation. She also assured me it was entirely independent of the video game, which she'd never played either. And still I wasn't keen.

Well, that was my mistake. Arcane is one of the best animated shows I've ever seen. It's been out for far too long for it to be worth my reviewing it properly, so I'll just say if for any reason you've been avoiding watching it you should do yourself a favor and start. Today, preferably.

Even if you aren't interested in the magitech world-building and fantasy plotline, something that seems exceedingly unlikely given what I know about the readership of this blog, it's worth seeing just for the visuals. If I've ever seen a better-animated show I can't immediately bring it to mind. 

The whole thing looks extremely expensive, as if a very great deal of money has been spent on producing animation far, far more lush and rich than any television show should have. It would be impressive for a movie, let alone a TV series. You could freeze-frame it and explore the individual images for hours although that would lose the enthralling, mesmerizing camera-work that makes the whole thing so astonishingly and thrillingly kinetic.

All of which stands in stark contrast to The Mighty Nein. Even before I had Arcane for comparison I was surprised by how flat and static the newer show looked. The first episode made me wonder if they were intentionally aiming for the look and feel of an 'eighties Sarturday Morning Cartoon. 

After a couple episodes I attuned to the look of TM9 and began to appreciate the way the show was doing more with less but then I started watching Arcane and TM9 went back to looking stiff and unfinished. It didn't put me off carrying on watching it but it was hard not to notice how perfunctory a lot of the imagery appeared in comparison.

Looks aren't everything, of course. Substance over style can be a mantra that works. Except that in this case Arcane has orders of magnitude more substance as well. 

I wouldn't attempt to precis the plot of either show. They're both quite twisty. Arcane, though, is truly complex while TM9 is mostly just complicated. One's a pantomime romp, the other's a greek tragedy. 

Each show relies on a good deal of character work as part of the narrative, with multiple characters appearing to be one thing and then turning out to be something else instead. In Arcane that feels like genuine character development. In TM9 it can have a whiff of Plot Logic.

I found Arcane to be quite an emotional experience. The characters are introduced and presented in a way that makes them feel like people you know. When things happen to them, there's a resonance. In TM9 they're more like performers you watch. When things happen to them, you're entertained.

The two approaches both work. I enjoyed both shows. The difference is in how much it feels like anything I saw mattered. Arcane operates much more on the lines of classical drama, working towards a catharsis. TM9 is more like a blockbuster movie, albeit one that's been put together on a very limited budget.

Characterization is strong in both but again in very different ways. TM9 relies very heavily on the well-rehearsed talents of a troupe of actors very much used to working together. There can be a sense of people "doing their turn", sometimes. The voice acting in Arcane feels much more individual, with a uniformly high level of skill but an absence of too-easy familiarity.

Of the two, there's no doubt which I preferred or which I thought was better-realized. Arcane not only aims much, much higher, it also hits the target bang in the middle. TM9 rolls along very cheerily but there were multiple occasions when things didn't quite seem to fit together or follow through and the whole affair had a very slightly ramshackle feel to it, now and again.

 

But it was very entertaining. The Mighty Nein is frequently funny, occasionally exciting and almost always fun to watch. I enjoyed it a good deal and will be very happy to watch the second season, currently in production.

Arcane, on the other hand, was a lot. I was exhausted by the end. Without giving anything away, it has a fantastic ending that I actually couldn't believe was the ending. I had to google it to make sure there wasn't another episode to come.

I found it completely satisfying and absolutely enthralling. But I finished it almost a month ago and I haven't started the second season yet. 

This is the thing: the two shows are ostensibly working the same end of the market but they're serving very different purposes. You need to be aware of the commitment levels each requires, which are radically different.

I mostly watch TV shows late in the evening. Usually, I'm looking for something relaxing that will see me asleep almost as soon as it ends. I'm not really in the market for thought-provoking art that's going to keep me awake for another hour, pondering the implications.

When I start the second season of Arcane, I'll be sure to have something lighter ready to follow it each evening. A kind of decompression show that'll clear my mind for sleep. So far, I haven't come up with one but I'm sure there's something out there. 

I very much doubt it's going to be that other show I know I ought to be watching. That other video-game spin-off that also had stellar reviews when it came out and that I've also been avoiding ever since. The one that just started a new season. The one that's currently #1 on Prime in the UK. The one you're watching. Yes, that one.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject, I did finally get around to watching KPop Demon Hunters. And I loved it. Now, that would be an ideal show to wind down at the end of an evening. 

Unfortunately, it's not a show. It's a short movie. And the sequel, which will also be a short movie, won't be here until 2029.

Any suggestions what I could watch until then?  

Three Shows Down

That post I wrote about the Kindle Fire? It didn't entirely come out of left field. You know how when you're driving on ice and the car goes into a skid and you're meant to steer into it - well, it happened like that.

It was supposed to be about what I've been watching on TV recently, which is why it opens with the paragraph about my viewing routine but let's not start all that again. The point is what I watched, not how or where I watched it.

It's been a while since I last wrote one of these. April, to be precise. Longer than I thought. Since then I've started some shows, finished some more, and I'm still in the midldle of watching the rest. As I said back then, there's a problem in writing about watching TV, which is that it takes weeks, even months to finish a series. They run across each other and there's seldom a neat, tidy moment to stop and assess.

So I'm just going to get on with it. It'll be messy but hey. I can at least begin with the shows I've watched all the way through. They all happen to be on Prime. I don't know if that means anything.

The Legend of Vox Machina

I was wary of this. It looked a bit shoddy. I was short an animation at the time, though, several others having non-started on me, so I gave it a go.

The tone was hard to define at first. It seemed like comedy-fantasy, always a risk, but I could sense there were undertones I wasn't getting, a rumble of subtext. I quite liked the characters, though, and the jokes didn't make me ill so I stuck with it and gradually it occurred to me it might be an adaptation of something I'd read other people talking about a good while ago. 

And it was. According to Wikipedia the show is "based on the first campaign of the Dungeons & Dragons web series Critical Role." I imagine everyone already knew that. 

Finding out the origin neither increased nor diminished my enjoyment. It was an interesting piece of background but no more. By then I was moderately invested in the storyline and more interested in where the show was going than where it had come from.

I finished watching it a few weeks ago and already I can't remember all that much about it. That's the danger of leaving these things too long. I can remember the characters, though, and enjoying myself, so I'm pleased to see a third season was commisioned late last year although it seems like it won't surface on Prime until early 2024 at the earliest.

Having enjoyed the animation, you'd have thought I might have felt more like giving the live role-playing show a look, something I've always resisted, no matter how people have talked it up. Somehow, I don't. 

Swedish Dicks

I watched this around the same time but I remember it a lot more clearly. If you want to talk about a show with an odd tone...

The Swedish Dicks are literally that: two Swedes who live in Los Angeles and work as private detectives. At the beginning there's just one Swedish Dick and the agency is called The Swedish Dick. Then another Swede turns up and joins so they add an "s" to the end of the name. The writers seem so pleased with that joke they focus it a couple of times, which should give you some idea.

When I was about eight or nine and no doubt an embarrassingly preocious trial to all who met me, I once had an argument with my Aunt over the word "dick". I insisted it was a legitimate nickname for a detective. She was equally sure it wasn't and that I oughtn't to be saying it at all. She's still alive but she's in her late 'eighties now. Probably a bit late to call her up and tell her I was right. (I knew I was right then, of course. I wasn't bloody guessing, was I?)

I liked this show quite a lot. It's funny enough to carry the elevator pitch premise. It also has the weirdest casting. The two leads are Swedish-born character actor Peter Stormare, a familiar face, if not name, from umpteen Hollywood movies and Johan Glans, a Swedish stand-up comedian. So far, so logical.

Among the recurring cast are Traci Lords, a name even I can recognize as synonymous with the porn industry and... Keanu Reeves. The Wikipedia entry for the show goes into some detail about how Lords got the part but how they landed Keanu remains a mystery. He's very... Keanu in it.

My favorite characters were none of the above. I liked Vivian Bang as Sun, the enigmatically terrifying Vietnamese woman who has a business in the same office block as the Dicks and becomes increasingly entwined with their bizarre cases and Felisha Cooper, playing Sarah, kick-ass lawyer and unlikely daughter of original dick Ingmar, who... ditto.

The show ran two seasons, two more than it had any right to run. It didn't go down well with the critics but I liked it. It's ramshackle and most of it makes no sense but it hangs together, somehow. Much like the rest of Keanu's career, now I come to think of it...

Deadloch

Oh boy. Everything Swedish Dicks probably wishes it was, Deadloch is by orders of magnitude. Hysterically funny, jaw-droppingly weird, mostly uncategorizeable, barely describable. An absolute one-off.

It's Australian, set in a no-mark country town in the backwoods of Tasmania. The two central characters are senior sergeant Dulcie Collins (Kate Box), the town's senior police officer, and senior investigator Eddie Redcliffe (Madeleine Sami), a detective flown in from Darwin to take over a murder investigation. 

The police contingent is rounded out by the excellent Sven (Tom Ballard) and Abby (Nina Oyama) and there's a huge ensemble cast of townspeople, almost all of whom are confoundingly peculiar. A few are even likeable.

The first three episodes are the broadest of broad farce and also, without any possible challenge, the sweariest thing I have ever seen on the small screen. Seriously, the swearing just never stops. And it's hard swears, too! I love truly creative swearing and this is outstanding. I'd quote some of the best bits but I'd be too embarrassed to type them out. 

Sadly, almost none of the strengths of the show are evident in the bland trailer but it's all we've got, so use your imagination.

The opening episodes are extremely funny and I was expecting the whole season to continue that way but it does a slow pivot in the middle to become much more of a police procedural. It's still funny but the humor starts to disappear under the encroaching shadow as the scale of the threat becomes clear.

As well as mounting an attempt on the Guinness Televised Swearing record (Not a real record, sadly.) Deadloch also seems to be trying to dismantle the entire concept of the Australian national character. I'm guessing there must be a whole strata of subcultural satire going on that non-Australians are going to miss but even judging by the part that juts above the surface, this is brutal stuff.

The show also evidences an almost mythical socio-cultural ambition, denaturing expectations left and right and leaving them bleeding in the Tasmanian mud. I spent some time trying to work out if the writers were trying to favor any particular ethnic, gender, class or orientational grouping over the rest but in the end I came to the conclusion they found every one of them worth poking hard. 

The First Nation characters come out of it best but certainly not unscathed. Straight, white men get it the worst. I'm not sure there's a single, heterosexual caucasian cis-male that isn't proven loathesome by the end. Everyone else gets pummelled repeatedly but somehow makes it through with at least a tatter of some kind of dignity or credibility.

The show ends with a very definite and satisfying resolution, albeit one that gave me unplasant flashbacks for about a week, which makes it entirely comfortable to recommend as a mini-series in terms of narrative conclusion but only providing you can cope with everything else it's going to throw at you. 

The coda, however, is a blatant set-up for Season 2 which, if it ever happens, looks like will shift the action to Eddie's home town of Darwin in the Australian far north. I hope they make it - Dulcie and Eddie and the showrunners both.

And that's what I've finished watching. Next time we'll take a look at what I still am, although of course there's a chance I might have finished at least one more show by then. 

I said this was going to be tricky.