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. 

The Owls Are In The Walls (IYKYK, Right?)

In a vain attempt to prevent this blog from turning into All Neverness To Everness! All Day! Every Day!, something it could so very easily become, seeing as how I have so many ideas for posts - posts about what I'm doing in the game, what I'm thinking about the game, what the hell is going on in the game (Big mystery there and I don't mean the plot because - erm - what plot?), I thought I'd post about a TV show I just watched instead.

And for once it's something current! Not an old show from the nineties I finally got around to catching up with or even something from five or ten years ago. No, I actually watched a new show on Netflix while it was in the Top Ten. It was at #1 for a short while in the UK so I guess at least a few people reading this might have seen it too.

If that's you, feel free to carry on. If not, you might want to know up front that the whole of the rest of this post is going to be 

SPOILER CITY!!

Ah, yes. Spoilers aaall the way down from here on. At least I didn't use that flashing gif for the warning this time. That can be really annoying.

Okay, that's probably given everyone who wants to leave enough time to skedaddle. On with the post...

Didn't mention the name of the show yet, did I? It's The Boroughs. 

Let's see if I can do a quick precis of the premis: 

A bunch of old, rich people settle down to enjoy their golden years in a full-service, luxury retirement village somewhere in the desert only to find creepy monsters are sneaking into their condos at night and sucking out their brain juice. Shenanigans ensue.

Yeah, that about covers it but I left out the immortality, the sociopaths and the sentiment. Stir those in and you're good.

So, what actually happens is grieving widower, Sam. (Alfred Molina. Excellent.) gets dropped off at his new condo that his dead wife insisted they get before she died. (I'd say "obviously" but actually it's not so obvious as all that, as it turns out, since she keeps turning up after she's dead. In dreams. On the TV. In the kitchen.) 

Sam does not want to be there but if he leaves he loses all the money he put into buying the place. Or renting it. Or however it works. It's never explained, just like nothing in the whole damn show is ever explained. 

All he wants to do is get out of the contract and leave but he'd lose all his money (Seems unlikely but there it is.) so he's stuck with it. Until he has the great good luck to be attacked in his own home and lightly stabbed by the previous occupant, Edward (Ed Begley Jr. Great as always but wasted in a such a small role.)

Despite being offered all his money back if he'll just keep quiet and leave, the grumpy old git has started to make friends so he decides to stay. Bad idea. The very next day he finds one of his friends (Bill Pullman, good but brief.) dead of a heart attack because a nightmarish creature has been visiting him in the night and sucking out his cerebral fluid. Unsurprisingly, no-one believes this. More fools them. They'll learn.

I won't rehash the entire plot, although I could because I can remember it all, something that suggests it was quite vivid. It was that, alright. It just wasn't coherent, believable, convincing or sane. None of those. It was fun, though, which is the most important one.

The whole show is fun. It's so high-concept you could sky-dive off it. If you did, it'd be a bad idea to stop and think about it on the way down because you'd be none the wiser when you hit bottom and you'd have missed the great view. If you're the kind of person who likes things to make sense or be explained then you might not have such a good time with it as I did.

I don't always mind if things don't make sense so long as I'm having a good time. It's like riding a roller-coaster (Not that I like those. I do not like those.). It doesn't matter how the car stays on the tracks so long as it does. A thrill ride is a thrill ride so long as you don't come off at the corners and The Boroughs always manages to make those tight turns, somehow.

A lot of that is down to the cast. It's an impressive line-up. If you wanted to get a bunch of old people together for a TV show, you could do a lot worse than this. As well as the aforementioned Molina and Begley and Pullman you get Geena Davis, who does not look even close to being old enough to be in a retirement village. (I just looked her up and she's two years older than me. She looks twenty years younger in this and I look good for my age, let me tell you!) You also get Alfre Woodard, Denis O'Hare, Clarke Peters and a bunch of other people you absolutely will know from big shows and successful movies. 

These people know what they're doing and watching them do it is probably enough reason in itself to go with it but the script is pretty good, too. It doesn't have a whole lot of zingy one-liners but it's frequently wryly amusing and rarely feels awkward, which is quite the achievement if you stop to think about some of the things these people are doing, which honestly you really should not, not if you want to stay in the story. Some good meta bits, too, like the whole Thelma and Louise riff the writers have going on for a while.

Not that any of that makes a whole lot of sense but then what does? This post could so easily become one long litany of "Well, that wouldn't happen..." because even if you accept spider-like monsters that come out of your microwave oven at night to suck out your spinal-cerebral fluids through your open mouth as you sleep then go back to pump it into their mother-monster, who's being farmed by hundred year-old psychopaths for her blood because it makes them immortal, then The Boroughs is still hard to believe because of the way every single person deals with it when they find out. It's like they think they're in a TV show or something!

I mean, for one thing these people aren't prisoners. Okay, yes, eventually they are prisoners but not for most of the run of the show, they're not. They have cars and phones and families in the world beyond the gates. You're not telling me they don't go on vacation or on trips. They're clearly all pretty damn rich. They can leave if they want. We actually see one of them drive in and out and wave to the guard several times. It's only much later, when everything's already gone to hell, that they're trapped inside.

If you found out there were brain-sucking monsters in tunnels under your condo, monsters that were coming into your bedroom while you slept, sticking their feeder tentacles down your throat, making holes in you that can still be seen the next day if you just shine a light down there and look, would you stay another night to see if it happens again? I bloody wouldn't!

Of course, if anyone ever behaved rationally or logically in any supernatural horror show, there would be no supernatural horror shows. Just a lot of aerial shots of jammed roads as everyone tries to leave town at once. 

This is a supernatural horror show, in case that wasn't immediately obvious. It's from the same stable as Stranger Things. Well, the next stable along, maybe. The Duffer Brothers had something to do with it, anyway, although I suspect it may not have been that much. They're listed as "Executive Producers", which means nothing. Netflix is keen you should know the show bears their imprimatur all the same, obviously hoping that'll be enough to grab your interest. It works, too. That's how I came to start watching.   

But The Boroughs is nothing like Stranger Things. Except when it kind of is, which now I come to think about it, is quite often, really, what with all the tunnels and monsters and men in suits stepping out of big, black cars...

The pacing, though. That could not possibly be any more different. The Boroughs positively zips along. As soon as anyone has any kind of idea or plan they're on it the very next minute. No discussions. no arguments. No making diagrams or taking notes. Straight to the execution.

Events and even set pieces that would have filled a whole episode of Stranger Things barely manage a couple of scenes. Oddly, it doesn't make things feel rushed, probably because what's been left out is all that character stuff Stranger Things was so big on. Those countless hours when what we mostly got to see was people getting to know each other. Slowly. The Boroughs has none of that. It takes everyone two days, max, before they're best buds.

Partly it's crisis bonding but mostly it's because there's no time for anything longer. They're old! They don't have much time left! 

Everyone's painfully aware of their own mortality, evil immortals included, which is ironic, isn't it? As for our heroes, it's a bit rich considering how fit, healthy and good-looking they all are compared to actual old people but then the definition of "old" in the show is hazy anyway. Wally reveals he's only 62 at one point, not even state retirement age where I live, let alone where the show's set. 

That looks like it might be Nevada. Where the atom tests were, which might explain the monsters, although it could also just be me, trying to retrofit some kind of origin story onto the whole affair since the writers can't be bothered to come up with one. 

Wally does have terminal cancer though so, yeah, mortality is knocking harder for him than the rest, even if the years aren't. They all make friends fast because they have to get in there quick before one of them dies, I guess. They do go on about it a lot, that's for sure.

And they need to get on with it, too, whatever they're thinking, because friend-bonding is what this show is all about. That and romantic love, which apparently saves some people and damns others. You may remember me citing sentiment as a big factor in the show, up there at the top of the post. The entire motivation behind the insane enterprise that is The Boroughs can be summed up in five words: We Did It For Love. 

Well, one of the two big bads Did It For Love, anyway: Blaine. (Played by Seth Numrich. Numb, scary, nuanced, good.) He just wants to make everything perfect for his beloved wife. Forever. At any cost.

Sideabar: Blaine? Really? He was supposedly an adult in the 1950s. Who was called Blaine in the '30s? Did the name "Blaine" even exist before the 1980s, when it became Hollywood code for "slick, rich, guy who looks cool but everyone knows is hollow inside"? Which is what he is, I guess. So, fair. (Also, edit for truth, I looked it up and Blaine was popular in the 19th century. Peak year for babies called Blaine: 1884. My bad but don't say you never learn anything on this blog.)

His wife, Annelise, (Alice Kremelberg. Plays her like a robot, presumably intentionally but it's hard to be sure.) never gets enough lines for us to work out what the hell she's in it for. She gets to be really, disturbingly, Evil with a capital E. Cartoon evil, that is. 

She makes as much of the part as she can but she's never playing anything you could call a real person. She's like the wicked witch in a Disney movie. Her polio backstory that's presumably supposed to explain her fear and need is so under-sold you could miss it if you were eating popcorn when it's revealed, which you very well might be because this is a total popcorn show. And even if you're paying attention, it explains nothing about her pathological cruelty. 

Was she like that before? Did her pain turn her evil? Was it the alien blood? Who fucking knows? Not me. And not the writers, either, apparently.

Where The Boroughs is like Stranger Things is in the whole chosen family thing. Most of these people have an actual family outside the Boroughs - children and grandchildren that they occasionally mention - but we only ever get to see Sam's daughter (Jena Malone. Excellent and underused) and her annoying husband (And very briefly, at the end, their children, who don't get anything much to do or say.) There's occasionally some talk about family but as in Hawkins, in The Boroughs your family ends up being the people who'll fight monsters with you. If you're related to them by blood, great, but it's by no means obligatory.

There's a good deal of front-loaded irony, what with time running out for the good guys because they're doing the right thing ideal butting up against the immortals being really, really evil and possibly getting to live forever. Some people waver and try to fudge or even change sides but it's the kind of show where you always know who the good guys and the bad guys are. Sometimes they wobble on the line but they never fall over it. Not to mention the ever-popular "But who were the real monsters, anyway?"

It makes the whole thing kind of heart-warming. Everyone who isn't an out-and-out villain is kinda-sorta nice. There's a bit of the grumpy old geezer thing going on but under the crusty exterior or the selfish spend-it-while-you-still-got-it indulgence, you know there's always a good heart. 

The villains are far more underwritten but it makes some of them quite interesting for the space that leaves. I'd have liked to know more about the woman who shows new arrivals around the homes or the doctor who manages Mother. And especially the Police Chief, who looks confusingly like a fatter, slobbier David Harbour playing Stranger Things' Hopper's evil cousin. He gets a weird moment near the end that almost humanizes him, which is very odd. I could have done with a little more of that.

Mostly, though, everything wraps up very neatly in eight episodes, so long as you're happy to accept that absolutely nothing about any of it is ever going to be explained to anyone's satisfaction, yours or the cast's. (What are the monsters? Where did they come from? How did Blaine find out what they could do? What was that peach all about? And that weird goo bath? Why do old cathode ray TV sets have such a devastating effect on the immortals and why not the same effect on all of them? How could those tunnels have possibly been constructed without hundreds of people knowing? And on and on and on...) You'd think it was a mini-series, never intended to continue, except...

Oh, yes. Except. There's always that one hook, right at the end in every mini-series, isn't there? just in case it goes really well and they want to come back for an encore. In this one it happens just before the final credits, when Sam's image glitches in the mirror. And that final shot, too, the one where it looks like the stars go out. That's a door being left open.

I hope there is another season. And if there is, I hope it doesn't explain anything any more clearly more than the first. Mysteries are intriguing but solutions are often disappointing. Leave it all out there in the desert. With the dead crows.

Muskrat Love?

The first thing I did when I started this post was check the Labels to see what I'd written about The Expanse already. 

 

There is no Label for The Expanse.

OK, so I forgot to make a Label. That's fine. Blogger has a solid search function. I'll find my posts and reviews with that.

 

Plenty of matches but almost all of them for other Expanses, mostly the Svarni Expanse, a zone in EverQuest II. There was the odd mention of the TV series but only a line, here and there, in posts about other topics entirely. It seems I never reviewed the show at all, not even a single paragraph in a portmanteau post.

Well, that's strange. I watched all six seasons. Not like me not to have said something about them. But I didn't. I just scrolled back through all the posts labeled "TV" from 2022, when the final season aired on Prime, to when I first began writing about TV shows here which, somewhat to my surprise, was only in 2020. Posting about what I'd been watching started as a pandemic thing and never ended , apparently. A bit like Valheim's Early Access.

That kind of puts a rail gun round through the double hull of the post I was going to write. I can hardly reflect on what effect reading the books has had on my feelings about the TV series if I can't go back and refresh my memory on what those feelings might have been.

I mean, you can't expect me to remember, surely? I don't have that kind of self-starting memory. I have the kind that requires a catalyst for the reaction to begin. If I even see the cover of a book I read years ago or a still from a movie, everything slowly starts to come back but without some kind of stimulus, I got nothing.

Oh, yes, sure, I could go watch some clips on YouTube. The trailers usually do a good job of reminding me what went on. But it would be missing the point more than a little. I wanted to know what I thought about it then, not what being reminded of it makes me think now.

So we'll scrap that idea and just talk about the books, I guess. I just finished the ninth and final volume, Leviathan Falls. It took me about a month to read them all. Maybe it was a bit longer. I wasn't counting. 

I bought the entire series for £2.00 each in a charity shop last year. Or I thought I did. When I got to the end of the last one, that was when I found out there are actually nine books in the series, not eight, so I had to buy the last one pretty sharpish. Good thing I work in a bookshop. 

It was certainly a lot of reading to do in a shortish period, whatever. None of the books runs under five hundred pages so that's getting on for five thousand pages in total. It's an extremely easy read, though. It fairly races along. There are hardly any longueurs, at least not until the smattering of faux-poetic/surrealist "Dreamer" chapters turn up in the last book. Those did slow the whole thing down a tad.

The most notable thing for me was how incredibly closely the TV series seems to have stuck to the original. Not always a good thing in my opinion. I love adaptations the way I love cover songs and for the same reason; it's fascinating to see what changes. In this case not much changed. Not much at all.

I could almost literally see the scenes from the adaptation playing out in my head as I read the books. The characters are all exactly the same, with the possible exception of Bobbie Draper, and then only, presumably, because the casting director didn't manage to find a suitable Polynesian actor to play her. My friend, who watched and read all of this before me, says Amos is different in the books but I couldn't see it. Well, not until... but, no, spoiler... let's not go there.

Also in my head, everyone in the books sounds exactly like the actors who played their characters in the show because the dialog seems to be identical down to the inflection. Except I can't remember the dialog, so that must be subjective. Still true, though, I bet.

The one huge deviation, of course, is that Alex dies in the TV show, where he doesn't in the books. He got written out because the actor playing him did something Amazon didn't want to be associated with, i think. Can't remember what it was, if I ever even knew.

I knew, roughly, when Alex disappeared but even now I have absolutely no clue how the narrative changed in the show to allow for his absence. That was the point where I realized I wasn't so much remembering what happened in the show as re-watching the show by way of the book. 

I felt the narrative in general becoming less familiar after that. More divergent. I seem to remember Drummer having a much bigger part in the show than she does in the book, for a start. I also thought Filip ended up going dutchman with his father's ship, too, not going AWOL before it left port and thereby surviving.

If that's what happened. Filip literally never appears in the narrative afterwards.He barely gets a passing mention. I kept waiting for his plot-line to pick back up but it never does. Did I miss something?

There are a few moments like that but not many. Mostly, the two authors that make up the James S. A Corey gestalt (Ironic, that, isn't it? Given the ending of the series.) keep all the balls in the air and all the plates spinning. I bet they were glad to get to the end all the same.

The last few books, the ones that carry on "Thirty Years Later..." past the point where the show ended, feel a little different to the rest. The series starts off as a kind of gritty, near-future noir, confined to a single system and focusing on very human concerns but it ends up being a full-blown cosmic space opera, a universe-shattering battle with quasi-Lovecraftian Elder Gods from another dimension.

None of it really bears close examination, not if you're trying to avoid picking holes. At one point, quite late on, someone makes the observation that Holden and his crew seem to be extraordinarily lucky. Geez! You think? They have more lives than ninety-nine cats!

But that's just about the best thing about the series from my perspective. The older I get, the less time I have for stories that don't turn out well. I don't just want to like the characters I'm reading about, although I very much prefer it if I do. I like them to have a good time, too. I like a happy ending but I also like a happy beginning and a happy in-between if I can get them.

The Expanse is all happy endings. OK, not for the literally billions of people who die, many of them horribly. But they're just NPCs. We don't know them and we don't care about them. Almost everyone you could think of as even a minor supporting character either gets a noble death Doing The Right Thing or doesn't die at all. Even nearly all the baddies! 

In fact - no spoilers - some of them don't even die when they die!

Jim Holden is a total Pollyanna and I get the feeling the authors must be too. They really do want all their readers to have a good time. They even bring in a lovable dog towards the end for absolutely no reason I can see other than they thought it would be nice to have a lovable dog in the story. Talk about fan service!

That dog, though... If there's one moment when disbelief ceases to be suspendable it's when you think about how that dog stays happy and healthy through the same physical stresses that almost kill most of the crew. She's always described as smiling or grinning or having a great time, even when everyone else is getting crushed into paste by thrust.

And she's not even a young, fit dog! She's an old dog being subjected to G-forces that Corey spends paragraph after paragraph telling us are incredibly hard to survive, even in custom made crash couches, with huge doses of custom-designed drugs, some of which are amphetamines. 

Yet they can just get a dog on the spur of the moment and Amos somehow whips up a perfect dog-suitable equivalent in five minutes! And the dog doesn't just survive, she settles in and acts like she's been in space all her life!

Yeah, I had a problem with the dog. But don't start picking holes in the plot, that's my advice. So I'll stop. I really didn't have anything to say about The Expanse anyway, other than it's good and if you haven't seen it, you should see it and if you haven't read it, you should read it.

I might get the audiobook next...

Never Forever

Yesterday it was a music Grab Bag, today it's games. Once again, I don't have anything particularly substantial to offer but you do the best you can with what you have. 

How Long Is Forever, Anyway? 

I'll start with the news everyone already knows, which is that Fortnite isn't all it used to be. Given that it used to be pretty much everything, that still leaves a lot of territory to cover so let's not go writing the game off just yet but maybe the writing is on the wall.

Fortnite isn't a game so much as a phenomenon. Lots of games blow up out of nowhere to dominate the sales charts and the gaming news cycle for a while but few hold that kind of attention for more than a few months. Fads happen and keep on happening and will always happen.

More rarely, a game will break out of the gaming silo to make an impact in the mainstream media. Animal Crossing: New Horizons did it a few years back and World of Warcraft a long time before that. The number of games that establish a seemingly permanent foothold in the wider culture, though? Still very small.

Fortnite was one of those. Still is, I guess, although it's probably more a part of the infrastructure now, like Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty or FIFA. Games that get referenced a lot when journalists write color pieces about what sporting heroes or pop stars do in their time off. Not a lot different to playing golf, really. Just indoors.

Fortnite, though, like Second Life before it, made it out of the lifestyle pages into what passes for cultural analysis in the popular press. I read a number of articles about how Fortnite was changing the way a generation thought and behaved, how it was replacing the village pump, the water-cooler or the Junior Common Room. There was a school of thought that believed nothing would ever be the same again, now the kids had a virtual clubhouse the adults couldn't chaperone.

Epic Games believed it and still does, apparently. I was pretty sold on it, too. I wrote some posts about it during the pandemic, when it did seem like meeting up and going to gigs in a video game might be the future. Still did, too, not so long ago. Like a lot of people, I'm too easily swayed by the science fiction I've read, although most days now it does seem disturbingly likely we'll all get to live in Phil Dick's world if we live long enough. Mercer help us. 

It wasn't just excitable journalists and eager bloggers who got swept up in the Fortnite feeding frenzy. As GamesIndustry reports, as with WoW before it, a swathe of the gaming industry did, too. Just as we had a decade of companies making WoW-Killers that went on to fail in the marketplace, so Fortnite has left behind it a comet-trail of burned out Forever Games. We have Fortnite to thank for the largely failed or failing Live Service model, at least in part.

With hindsight, it seems obvious. Not so much the grandiose claims of Fortnite-as-Metaverse, which turned out to be fairly accurate at least in a technical sense. More the idea that people en masse would want to keep logging in to the same virtual space "forever".

People, by and large, just aren't that interested in going to the same places over and over again. They lose their mystique, their thrill, their attraction. For everything there is a season, as Roger McGuinn liked to say. (Alright! It was Pete Seeger! No-one likes a smart alec.) 

More prosaically, look at your local high street or shopping mall. That's if you even still have one. Not only have most of the names over the stores changed since you first went there but these days even the idea of going to one place to find everything feels out of fashion.

And with games, particularly zeitgeisty ones like Fortnite that spring up out of nowhere overnight, there's always the Older Sibling Problem. Everyone knows most kids over the age of eight or nine think pretty much everything their parents like is either incomprehensible or embarrassing but there's a similar vibe to the media most loved by older brothers and sisters, except the younger kids do understand it and want no part of it.

Fortnite has been around for a decade now. A decade is literally a lifetime for a ten year-old. Is it surprising there's some resistance creeping in? Fortnite might be too new to feel retro but it's also too old to feel fresh. 

It's not like the game is going away, of course. It's robust. It works. It has many, many millions of ex-players. But is it ever going to be cool again? Magic 8-Ball says Very Doubtful.

I guess the upside is that now game developers are going to have to find a new high to chase. The downside is it'll probably be something a lot less interesting than Fortnite looked for a while as if it might be.

Never Is Closer Than Ever

Less than a month! Neverness to Everness, the game I'm most looking forward to this year (Sorry, EverQuest Legends.) has a launch date. It's April 29th.

You can pre-register now. It takes about five seconds - an email address and a couple of clicks. If you do, you'll be joining more than thirty million people so far. The current target is 35 million although I imagine if they hit it the ticker will move along to reveal the 40 million milestone. 

So far, pre-registrants get 30,000 Beetle Coins, 20 Elite Hunter Guides, 5 Fabricated Dice and A character called Haniel. What any of that actually means I have absolutely no idea but I'm sure it's something very important.

The reward for getting to 35 million pre-registrants seems a bit lame. It's just another 15 Fabricated Dice. But then, maybe Fabricated Dice are a big deal in Hetherau. I wouldn't know because they never let me into the beta. Not that I'm bitter... 

There's also a Social Media target. That's a lot lower at just five million Official Account Followers and so far the game hasn't managed it, which is probably a data point that means something. If that many people sign up before launch they get a Whisker Glider Skin. Or maybe we all do. It's unclear.

I just subscribed to the official YouTube channel so I guess that means I'll get the glider either way, so long as 4,999,999 other people sign up as well. I actually thought I was already subbed to that channel. Maybe it was on my other YouTube account. If it was, would that count twice? 

I don't have any qualms about the quality of NTE. I'm certain it'll be as good as it looks. What I'm a lot less sure about is whether I’ll make time to play it, no matter how good it is. By all accounts, Wuthering Waves continues to be every bit as good as I kept saying it was, which was very good indeed. 

And yet I haven't played WW for months, not least because it got to be too good. I seem to have developed a quality ceiling for video games beyond which I find it ever harder to rise. Somewhere in my psyche, a fail-safe is tripping, preventing me from becoming too engaged. If it feels as immersive a movie, it gets treated like a movie and movies require a level of commitment at least an order of magnitude higher than games. 

It's a weird Catch 22. Don't get too good or I won't be able to play you. And I fear Neverness to Everness might just be too good.

Sunnydale Forever, Doubters Never!

I meant to mention the bad news that the Buffy revival has been canceled before it even got started but I never found a spot to fit it in and it turns out I'm glad I didn't because now there's this to talk about as well. I heard about it from NME, my ever-unlikely source of gaming news that doesn't get covered in the general gaming media.

There is - because of course there is - a campaign to reverse the decision or to reboot the reboot or to free the rights so someone else can take a run at it or something. I haven't virtually signed it or indeed read it. My feeling is that the Buffy IP is so strong, someone will do something with it it eventually but it won't be because Buffy fans ask nicely. It'll be because someone thinks they've figured out how to make money off it.

Meanwhile, as well as all the original seven seasons, the comics, the novelizations and the spin-offs (I'm halfway through Season Two of Angel now and boy does that take a left turn...) we now have a game. It's called Welcome To New Sunnydale. It's text-only. It plays in a Browser. And it was made by a fan.

And it looks interesting. I've only played around with it so far. I haven't played it. It isn't really my sort of thing or not any more although there was a time when it might have been. I don't have the patience for these kinds of textual puzzles any more. 

I know a few other bloggers around these parts do, though, and a lot of people like a bit of Buffy, so I offer the link above as something of a public service. I very much doubt the game will do anything to change the minds of anyone that matters but it's nice that people are trying.

And that's all I've got. I suppose I'd better find an actual topic for tomorrow's post. My Grab Bag pile's empty.  

Drug Of The Nation? I Wish...

I let slip a while ago that I'd finally gotten around to watching the first season of Arcane, the animated series commissioned by Riot Games and supposedly based on, or at least inspired by, League of Legends. Everyone else, of course, watched the show years ago. The first season came out in late 2021 and the second and final season, which I have just finished watching, premiered three years later. Talk about being late to the party...

Why did I wait so long? It's not like I wasn't aware of it or how good it was reported to  be. The show has stellar reviews. It won a shed-load of prestigious awards. I remember a bunch of bloggers raving about it when it was new and my close friend, who has very good taste in TV and movies, tried to get to me watch it ages ago. 

It was the League of Legends connection that put me off. I've never played the game and never wanted to, which makes for an educative data point alongside Cyberpunk 2077, a game I've also never played but have frequently considered buying. There's an animated series based on that one, too, Edgerunners, and I didn't have any interest in that either, at least not until I found out Rosa Walton of Lets Eat Grandma had done the theme song.

Apparently, the presence of a gaming IP, even one I approve of, can actively deter me from watching a TV show. For corroborative evidence I offer Fallout, another highly-regarded show I have yet to see. This is clearly a personal foible and one I need to address. It's self-evidently preventing me from enjoying some of the very best work in the field.

Having watched Edgerunners I judged it "very, very good". I'm going to have to come up with something a lot more complimentary for Arcane. 

Arcane is possibly the best animated series I've ever seen. If there's a better one, I can't immediately think what might be. I'm sure most people reading this will already have watched it so I'm not going to go into a whole lot of hyperbolic detail about why it's so good. Everyone already knows and if they don't I strongly suggest they stop wasting time like I did and go find out what they've been missing. It's a lot.

The animation is almost literally breathtaking. It did make me draw in breath in surprise or awe a few times. I've spent a lifetime watching animated movies and television shows and I've never seen anything as rich and deep. The level of detail is astonishing but more astonishing still is the extent to which that detail informs the narrative. It's one thing to dress a set, another to reveal a world.

The writing is novelistic. Characters have inner and outer lives that extend beneath, above and beyond the text. There are no ciphers or stereotypes. Even the minor characters have substance.

The plot is labyrinthine, yet always navigable. The story works on multiple levels, from coming of age to family saga to epic myth, and somehow manages to keep all of them balanced throughout. 

Well, almost. The end shows signs of the elision from five seasons to two as Riot decided they'd accrued enough prestige from patronizing the arts and decided to cut their losses as costs spiraled. The fact that the show bears, by all accounts I've read, almost no resemblance to the video game and consequently had little to no impact on that game's profile or profitability, presumably factored strongly in the decision to fold.

Even so, the truncated ending is barely noticeable. The finale leans hard into the cosmic and it works. It might not be immediately comprehensible but it carries.

Who knows what would have happened across five seasons? Would the quality have held up? Maybe it's better it ended when and as it did.

I was certainly satisfied. And satiated. It was a hard watch in the sense that each episode drained me. I could not have watched two in a row without losing something. I'm bitterly aware of how much I missed but the thought of re-watching is overwhelming. In a year or two maybe. 

One thing Arcane did make me want to do was re-watch Edgerunners. I know it won't be an experience on the same level but now I'm wondering how much I might have missed there, too. One watch is never enough for anything, let alone something good.

I haven't gone back to Edgerunners just yet though. What I'm watching, now I have a space in my schedule, is more Angel, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off from 1999, doubling up from one episode a night to two.

I've had the box set on DVD for years and never even opened it. Once again, my main reason, other than sheer inertia, was that I thought I knew what it would be like. I always know. I'm often wrong.

I thought it would be dark, brooding and serious. Angel, as a character in Buffy, never seemed to have much going for him other than moody good looks and some bad-boy attitude, especially when his come-and-go soul went. Even though I knew the first four seasons of his own show also featured Charisma Carpenter as Cordelia and even though it's pretty hard to imagine Cordy ever being even remotely serious, that was still the impression I'd somehow acquired.

As, once again, I'm sure most people who come to this blog already know, I was wrong. Or I was for as much of the first season as I've seen so far, fifteen episodes. Maybe it gets darker later. Usually I like to wait until I've seen at least a whole season to comment but in this case I have an ulterior motive.

Before I get to it, let me just say Angel, the show, does not match my expectations at all. Like Buffy (The show, not so much the character.) it's as much a comedy as a thriller. It does hit some dark notes but so far it's orders of magnitude away from the relentlessly grim later seasons of Buffy, the grim, dour, depressing period, after Willow drags Buffy back from heaven. The very seasons that would have been running in tandem with Angel at the time. Who'd have thought Angel would have been the light relief?

Maybe it won't last. Maybe things will turn bleak in the coming seasons. I hope not. I'm enjoying the monster-of-the-week plots and all the mugging and slapstick (Wesley.) and snappy come-backs (Cordelia.). As for David Boreanaz and his perpetually confused look, it's a big improvement over his Heathcliff impression back in the Sunnydale era.

And just as Arcane made me want to re-watch Edgerunners, Angel makes me want to re-watch Buffy. I have the box set of that, too, which is just as well because, unlike Angel, which I'm watching on Amazon Prime Video for free, Buffy isn't streaming on any of my platforms just now.

The advantage of seeing Angel on Prime instead of DVD is convenience. The disadvantage is adverts. Prime, as we know, despite charging a subscription, wants you to pay extra to avoid ads. And here we come to my ulterior motive in talking early about Angel.

Those ads! What the heck are Amazon playing at? 

I don't mean by trying to make us watch them. I get that they're making money coming and going by charging companies to place ads and then charging viewers not to see them but for that ploy to work, wouldn't you think there'd need to be some pattern to it?

There is none! I watched one episode of Angel last week that had an advert before the show had even started, then another less than two minutes later, between the credits and the show itself . Then there were more ads every ten or fifteen minutes until the end. It was incredibly disruptive and annoying. Obviously I didn't watch any of the ads - I tabbed out and turned  the sound off - but just the constant interruption to the narrative was infuriating.

Prior to that, which was an exception, some episodes just opened with a trailer for another Prime show, something that barely counts as advertising at all in my eyes, then maybe popped in one more short ad much later in the program. That was very easy to ignore. Other episodes had the same cadence but with much longer ad breaks, which was more annoying but manageable.

The last three episodes I've watched, however, have had no adverts at all. None. Not even the opening trailer. It's spooky.

Am I'm being lulled into a false sense of security? Has one of my ad blockers, none of which should affect Prime at all, upgraded itself and taken control? Has Amazon not managed to sell any advertising space in these particular episodes?

It's disconcerting. I find myself waiting for the ads to start. I'm not saying I want them to but the suspense when they don't is getting to be altogether too much. At least when Mrs Bhagpuss and I watch the Great Pottery Showdown live on Channel 4, the ads (Which are universally terrible, by the way.) come at the same time in every episode. That's bad enough but it's far worse knowing they could pop up at any time. Or not at all.

I'd love to know if there's a commercial imperative behind the apparent randomness or whether something's just broken. Clearly, Amazon has the capacity both to target ads at specific viewers and also to place them in shows those people are likely to watch. Maybe no-one wants their ads turning up in random episodes of twenty-five year-old shows. Maybe Amazon thinks none of the ads would interest me. Who knows?

I don't but I'd love to. Anyone else getting this kind of sporadic, unpredictable advertising? Or have any theories what my be driving it?

A Runaway Success?

Before I forget everything I wanted to say about the show, I guess I'd better deal with Runaways. Or rather Marvel's Runaways as it's officially called. Why it has to have the name of the company bolted onto the front beats me. They don't call it Marvel's Wandavision or Marvel's Cloak and Dagger, do they?

I guess it might be because there's already a better-known Runaways brand in the culture, the all-female proto-punk band put together by Kim Fowley in the '70s, from which the legend that is Joan Jettt emerged. It's hard to imagine a situation where anyone would confuse the two, though, so it made me wonder if there was another comic-book outfit using the name. 

I checked. There isn't.

Leaving the problematic nomenclature aside, how's the show? Pretty good, I'd say. I enjoyed it a lot, anyway. 

Not that it's without flaws. As quite a few of the comments on reddit suggest, it does take its time getting going. For a super-hero show, it's not all that action-packed and I certainly wouldn't call it fast-paced, particularly in the first season.

Ah, the first season. I remember that one. Vaguely. I watched it a few years ago then took a long break until the second and third seasons turned up on a streaming service I was subbing, Amazon Prime. I've talked about the problems that hiatus caused already so I won't go over it again. I'll just say that most of the plot of Season One has come back to me now so I can see how the whole thing fits together.

There may be spoilers from here on in, so it you haven't seen the show and plan to, something I'd recommend if you have any interest either in YA dramas or super-hero shows or better yet both together, you may want to bookmark this post and come back to it after you've finished watching.

Here's how the story arc goes: 

Season One - a bunch of rich kids in their mid-teens find out their parents are serial killers. Yes, all of their parents. The kids try to foil their parents' nefarious plans and then run away from home, giving the series its title and USP. 

Season Two - the kids find a super-hero base to hang out in and spend most of the season trying to stop an alien collapsing the whole of California into the sea. The alien is the one who manipulated their parents into doing all those murders and by now not all of the parents are as on-board with the whole kidnap-and-murder lifestyle as they used to be.

Season Three - the alien is duly foiled but another threat immediately appears and needs some foiling of its own. By the end of the season some of the kids are dead (But not really.) and some of the parents too (For real.) and some of the parents aren't as evil and nefarious as they used to be, or not as far as their children see it, anyway.

There are a couple of problems. First there's the pacing, which is, as I've suggested, variable at best. I enjoyed the first season but it really took its time to get going. It's more of a mystery than an action show at times because it takes the kids a while to figure out what's going on and even longer for them to do anything about it. 

Season Two moves faster, has more action and is probably the most consistent and coherent of the three. There are clear villains and clear threats and almost everything makes sense. Season Three though...

I enjoyed the third season but it does a hard pivot half-way through, turning into what almost feels like a different show entirely. The first two-and-a-half seasons are science fiction but the final half-season is pure fantasy, with magic taking over completely. 

Also, in that last segment the remaining parents unequivocally ally with the runaway teens and become heroes instead of villains, many of them appearing to have had complete personality transplants in the process. By the end, the kids and their parents, for the most part, have reconciled.

I can see how this would piss some viewers off. As far as I can tell, the original comic on which the show is based presented the parents as unambiguously Evil with a Capital E. There was no light and shade at all. Kids = Good. Parents = Bad. If you were on board with that, you're not going to be happy about how the show handles those relationships.

For my part, though, I am already on record as describing those original issues of the comic, written by Brian K. Vaughan, as "execrable" and "one of the worst comics I'd read in fifty years". Since one of the reasons I loathed the comic book so much was the staggering immaturity of the writing, I was very much happier with the increasingly nuanced handling of complex inter-generational relationships as developed over the course of the three seasons of the adaptation.

In fact, that's the strongest aspect of the show. The kids are not wrong about their parents. They did indeed kidnap and kill a teenager a year at the behest of a charismatic cult-leader. All of them knew what they were doing, too, even if they'd been lied to about why. They are, as their children frequently call them, murderers. And all of the parents consistently claiming "But we did it for you! We just wanted to keep you safe!" neither expalins nor excuses the choices they made.

What does both explain and in some part excuse them is knowing they were being manipulated by a body-swapping alien the whole time. Also that at least some of them genuinely bought into the mysticism of that alien's fake church, a tenet of whose religion is that nothing ever really dies. So the kids they killed were just being assimilated into the energy of the universe or some such bullshit.

Seasons Two and Three really ramp up the ambiguity with both kids and parents being used as host bodies by aliens or being enchanted by Morgan le Fay (Yes, that one.) to do her evil will. It's a wonderfully evocative and affecting metaphor for the way children and parents are forced to re-evaluate each other as they age. 

After a while, no-one is really sure who anyone is any more. No-one knows anyone's motives. No-one knows who they can trust. As one character eventually points out, it's only by their actions they can be judged.

I loved all of that and there was a lot of it. By the end I doubt there was a single character on either side of the age gulf left unaffected or unchanged by the experience. There's some real character growth on show here and I found much of it very satisfying.

I also liked nearly all the characters, kids and parents both, although you can't really "like" the parents until they stop behaving like sociopaths, which doesn't happen until well into Season Two. It's an odd YA show in that there are more adult characters as there are teens, what with everyone having two parents and all of those parents having a fully-developed role. For much of Seasons Two and Three, it's also the parents who are, by a wide margin, the more interesting. 

And better acted, too, as evidenced in the many scenes where someone is playing a character being controlled by another character, sometimes pretending to be the original and sometimes revealing their true identity. The adult actors generally pull that difficult trick off more convincingly than their younger counterparts although everyone does a pretty good job of it.

If you're looking for a super-hero show, though, you're going to have to wait a long while before you get one. There are some good set-piece fights in Season Two but it isn't until the whole show pivots mid-Season Three that it turns into a full-on fight-fest. There are some good battles with Morgan and her Dark Dimension lackeys then.

Since I'm on the subject of super-heroics, let me just mention something about the Runaways as a super-hero team. They aren't one. Literally just one of them, Molly, not co-incidentally the youngest, believes they ought to be. No-one else is remotely interested in the idea.

To be a super-hero team, anyway, they'd need powers. What powers do they have?  

Nico has a very powerful magic staff that she doesn't fully know how to use and doesn't always have with her. Chase has a pair of military-grade battle-gloves he calls "Fistigons", which he frequently forgets to bring with him. Gert has a telepathic mind-link with a retro-engineered dinosaur she calls Old Lace, who nearly always has to be left somewhere safe because even in LA you can't go around with a dinosaur and not have people notice. As for Alex, he has no powers whatsoever. He's just great with computers and comesup with all the clever plans. 

The only two who have some super-ability always available are Karolina, the half-human, half-alien hybrid, who can glow, levitate and put on light-shows and Molly, who can become super-strong but also gets super-tired doing it. When most conflicts arrive, the team is woefully under-powered. 

Until the second half of season three, that is, by when they suddenly take it up a notch. Or, more specifically, Nico and Karolina do, with Nico eventually learning not only to master the staff but to do magic without it and Karolina firing force-blasts from her hands. Molly doesn't seem to need a lie down after every fight any more, either.

The show was cancelled after three seasons but it was clearly heading towards more traditional super-hero territory. The whole thing wraps up with a two-part, time-travel finale that I found both thematically and emotionally rewarding. There's a tiny lead-in at the very end that would obviously have been the set-up for a fourth season if there'd been one but it's very easy to dismiss. The whole thing comes to a neat and satisfying conclusion.

Overall, it's not a great show but it's a very good one. I feel like the time I spent watching was time well-spent. Can't ask for much more than that.

Umm... Did We Already Watch This?

One of the unanticipated artifacts of the streaming era, for me at least, is the way viewing stretches out in unpredictable and usually unwelcome directions. Several times now, I've started watching a show only to find that before I get to the end the rights have moved to another platform.

Since I'm usually subscribed to more than one streaming service at a time, if I'm lucky it's no more trouble than remembering where the show I was in the middle of watching has gone. Lucifer jumped from Amazon Prime to Netflix but since I was subscribing to both at the time, that wasn't much of a problem.

More often, though, the move is to a service I'm not using, which means making a choice between paying a further subscription just to keep watching or dropping the show, at least for the time being, in the hope it might eventually resurface on a service to which I have access. Or, if I really want to carry on watching, as happened in the case of Roswell New Mexico, using a VPN to find it on a platform outside my designated geographical territory.

There is sometimes another possibility, of course. In some ways it's my preferred option. That's to buy the damn thing on DVD. I'd add "Or on Blu-Ray" but I still don't own a Blu-Ray player. Every time I come close I remember I really don't care that much about the supposed visual fidelity and anyway isn't the whole physical format about to drop into the trash-bin of history?

Probably not, as it turns out. Back in the mid-teens, I was telling everyone who'd listen how the future wasn't just digital, it was virtual. No-one growing up in the 21st century would want to tie themselves down to a whole load of physical clutter, not when they could carry the entire history of cinema, literature and music in their pockets. 

Yeah. About that. Turns out I could not have been more wrong. Gen-Z flippin' love physical media. I don't have to read articles about it online. I can see it happening every day I go to work. Teens and twenty-somethings are all over the store, handling everything. They love to touch. 

They're the consumers driving the huge boom in exclusive editions, buying multiple variants of the same book just to have them all. They're the ones buying expensive hardbacks and gosh-wowing over the sprayed edges. 

 

It reminds me a little of the comic-book boom of the nineties, when publishers thought they could sell the same comic many times over just by issuing versions with different covers and packaging them in sealed plastic bags. The thing about that nasty little episode, though, was that most of the interest was fueled by greed. Comic fans believed if they bought all six different covers of the latest issue and never opened the sealed packages, all of them would increase in value as fast as the Flash could run.

Didn't happen. In fact, it didn't happen so much that the entire industry almost collapsed. It certainly drove me away from the hobby and from what I read afterwards, I was very much not the only one. 

This seems different. I hear so many conversations between customers as I move through the shop and not a single one has ever mentioned buying anything as an investment. They're all crazy in love with having something that looks great, that was written by someone whose writing they enjoy or which features characters they adore. There's a big collecting aspect to it, for sure, but mostly the drive seems to revolve around the sheer, physical, tactile, visual pleasure of seeing and touching something gorgeous.

Also, there's the permanence thing. A lot more people today seem to be aware that virtual ownership is ephemeral. A streaming subscription gives you unlimited access to what's on the stream but you have no say over what that is or how long it's going to be there. Even digital purchases only last as long as the service behind them and the hardware on which they run.

And it's a lot easier and more impressive to take a picture of yourself holding a book or a vinyl album to post on Instagram. It's harder to do the same with an eBook or a song you just found on Spotify. You can share your digital discoveries easily enough but bragging requires pictures.

Because, somewhat to my own surprise,  I am not utterly constrained by my previous belief systems, I, too, have modified my expectations concerning the digital future. I was pretty excited by it a decade ago, when the idea of being able to junk all my physical crap and replace it with orders of magnitude more convenient virtual crap seemed like an imminent reality.

Now I prefer to have hard copies of anything I really want to be sure I can come back to whenever I feel  like it. (The uncomfortable truth, that I probably never will come back to any of it, is something I prefer not to think about.) My problem is that, more often than you might expect, there is no physical media available for the stuff I want to keep.

Runaways is a good example. The show, produced by Marvel and originally released as a Hulu-exclusive, has, as far as I can tell, never been released in a physical format. I watched the first season some time ago, although I can't now remember which platform that was on. According to the production history on Wikipedia, it looks like it would have had to have been Disney+, to which I did subscribe for a while, but I thought I saw it earlier than that.

Wherever and wherever it was, I didn't finish the whole thing before it disappeared. Either I stopped subbing or it left the service. I'd be lying if I said I'd been pining to see the rest ever since but I did check if there was a box set I could buy. There was not. 

I hadn't thought about the show for a long while until a few weeks ago I spotted it in my Recommends on Prime. I was unexpectedly excited by the prospect of catching up with the show, most of whose characters I only vaguely remembered as "quite annoying". 

My never-reliable memory told me I'd seen the first two seasons so I started watching from the start of Season 3. I had no idea what the hell was going on. Sure, it'd been a while, but usually things like characters and plot come back to me very quickly, given a nudge. This time, nothing at all.

After half an hour of complete confusion I decided to go back to the start of Season 2 and start from there, which was just as well because I hadn't seen any of it before. It turns out I did not watch two seasons the first time around. I only watched the first. 

This post started out as a review of Season 2 of Runaways. That's not where it's going now. I will say that I think it's a very strong show, thematically absorbing, generally well-written and well-acted. As a superhero show it's a lot less superheroic than many and as a show ostensibly centered on teenagers, it has a lot more adult characters and adult-oriented content than you might expect. 

But I'll save a full review for when I've finished the third and final season. I'll be starting that tonight. It shouldn't take long. Towards the end of Season 2 I was enjoying it so much I was watching two episodes a night. Let's hope the final season is as compelling.

What I'm more interested highlighting just now is a more generalized observation on the increasing instability of my viewing options. 

I grew up in the era of broadcast television, before the general availability of any form of recording or time-shifting for home use. Until I was in my mid-20s, if I wanted to watch a TV show I had to make time to see it when it was shown.

If I missed that window, I might be lucky enough to catch it when it was repeated six months or a year later but you could never rely on something even getting a second showing. Many of them weren't even stored away safely by the broadcasters. They were treated as entirely disposable and taped over or thrown out with the trash.

 

What that meant was that if you really liked a show you made a point of being in when it came on. Barring accidents and emergencies, you would see every episode, in order, in one extended sequence that might take months. There'd usually be a week between episodes but most people could remember what happened a week ago pretty clearly. Continuity of narrative was mostly maintained.

Later came video and then DVD, meaning some shows could be owned like books or albums. If there was no official release, you could at least swipe your own copy and with timers you didn't even have to be there to do it. Now you had the choice, whether to follow along at the pace the broadcaster set or wait until the end and then watch it all at once. Or on any schedule you chose, really. You could also rewind to make sense of any bits you couldn't follow or to look at a particular scene in detail.

Later came the Box Set (Binge) era, which still lingers on in some contexts, although its cultural hegemony is over. Box sets got pushed into the background with the advent of the streaming era, when I and I'm sure many others thought we'd reached Peak Viewing Experience.

Everything would always be there. You'd be able to start and stop at will. It'd be like having the Great Library of Alexandria a fingertip's touch away.

That never happened. It felt a bit like it in the early days, when there were fewer streaming platforms and it seemed as if there might eventually be just one streamer to rule them all but, like the imagined end of physical possessions, that turned out to be a fantasy. 

Instead, not only do streaming platforms proliferate but they're all subdividing like amoebas, splitting into "channels", each of which requires a separate subscription. And as if that wasn't annoying enough, they're reverting to the traditional practices of the networks and broadcasters they were supposed to replace, scheduling shows weekly or at even less convenient intervals, presumably in the hope of constraining customers from exercising their increasingly numerous but decreasingly satisfying options.

All of which is well-known and most of which I've already hashed out here, about as often as Old Television put out repeats of the same damn shows. Except that watching Runaways has alerted me to a new phenomenon, which is that sometimes access to shows can be so disrupted I can't even fricken' remember what I've already watched!

It really was a shock to find I hadn't even watched an entire season of a show I thought I'd enjoyed. I could put that down to my ever-less-reliable memory but really I'm not going senile, not quite yet. I never had a great memory but it hasn't gotten substantially worse. I just never expected to have to follow a single series across multiple platforms, let alone over a period of years, in this counter-intuitive and very irritating fashion. 

At least in the broadcast era there were magazines you could buy with the schedules laid out clearly and unequivocally. And the networks announced entire slates of shows in advance for the whole of the Autumn, Winter and Spring. (Summer was all reruns, of course Who sits inside watching TV when the sun's out?) You had to wait but you knew what was coming and when and where.

 

I'm not saying it was better then, It was not better then. It's better now. But I think it might have been better still five or ten years ago, just for a moment. 

The good news, at least for me, is that it might, just possibly, get a bit better again, soon. I mentioned the other day that we in the UK are finally going to be able to watch HBO Max. That's quite exciting but there's been a further development.

In March, Sky, a service I have always shunned, will be offering a package including not just its own offerings but also HBO Max, Disney+, Hayu and Netflix. Supposedly, all of this will be available for £24 a month, which is not unreasonable. That's the base price, though, and I haven't seen the details. I bet it includes ads.

I have frequently paid more than that for multiple streaming services so it seems reasonable, especially when you compare it with subbing to Netflix and HBO Max separately. It won't do much for most of the issues I've been complaining about, namely scheduling nonsense or shows changing or leaving platforms, but it ought at least to reduce some of the churn.

Whether I'm willing to give money to an organization I've scrupulously avoided until now is another question. Decisions, as they say, have consequences although in this case the only consequence would be another compromise to feel morally uncomfortable about.. 

I guess I'll find out in March, when both the Sky package and the direct HBO Max stream become available. I suspect in the end my distaste for Sky will trump my penny-pinching parsimony but I wouldn't - ironically - put money on it.