Jump to content

Type keyword(s) to search

JakersWild

Member
  • Posts

    20
  • Joined

Reputation

32 Excellent
  1. This show has always required a lot of suspension of disbelief, but wow: The idea that an international bank transfer of a huge sum of money could be trapped in a digital device, and that world governments couldn't just have the transfer voided along with the trapped money, is ridiculous. It isn't even cryptocurrency. It's basically a digital document saying move x amount of money from here to here.
  2. I'd gone back and paused the document on the tablet. At the top it says "transcript... [unauthorized cell phone recording...]" It also says Exhibit A at the top left, and is formatted a bit like a court document. There are a few hand written notes at the bottom of the page, but nothing apparently substantive. Overall I'm as confused as I'm supposed to be about details this season. I am enjoying the ride despite it feeling like a soft reboot, even though the producers say this was always the plan. While I never liked Hale, I have tended to enjoy HaleNo. Apparently liking the Maeve episode has me out of step with many too, but that's fine. It's good to see potential endgames of data mining brought forward in a way that mirrors today. There are already companies that combine personality test data with social media data and public records to score potential employees. That sort of thing is only getting worse as it gets more sophisticated. It will be interesting to see how much they explore not being able to challenge the ruling of "AI", if you even ever know that the ruling happened. Stories about neural nets (that get called AI) like one of Google's tagging photos of some children as dogs, for example, make me wonder. Humans make mistakes or have biases, but if discovered one can ask a person why they did that and go from there. With an algorithm, one can find an error in the code. With current "AI" that was trained rather than directly programmed, it is impossible to ask why it reached the result it did, or find a bug. One can only ditch it and start again, or train it better. What will we do if/when such things are making decisions about our lives with biases or glitches we don't understand or even know exist, and that are hard to challenge because people often tend to assume computers don't make such errors.
  3. You are likely in the minority. My friends and I always find him a pleasure to watch, especially when he is playing weird and creepy. He was brilliant in Fringe in particular, and demonstrated great range in his acting abilities thanks to the complex character he was given. Some of the characters he plays are bad guys we're not supposed to like, but most seem to enjoy him playing them. As for this BL episode, major meh, echoing what many have said here. It would be great to rap this arc up and stop centering stories around Lizzie drama. Let the kid and dogs stay MIA, Tom is dead, story is satisfied with her being Red's daughter, and let us get back to focusing on the blacklist and the whole team -- hopefully with some stronger blacklisters.
  4. Agreed. It has also meant, aside from the cabin episode, that we see far less of her character -- time-wise anyway. Bonus! The show works better when it focuses overall on Red and the whole FBI team, not mostly on Red and Lizzie. The primary plot with the heist was ridiculous but fun. It reminds me of what I've said about The Mentalist and The Closer back in the day: "It turns out I enjoy a light-hearted show with good characters that is about murders and other awful crimes, but also makes me laugh."
  5. Glad to know it wasn't just me. It eventually picked up briefly, but after 30 minutes of sheer boredom it was hard to care.
  6. Agreed. While they changed Tom's character's behavior a bit too often to serve the plot, ultimately his character worked far better than Liz's. He was good in Redemption, and I'd have watched if it were renewed. Other than the fact that Liz is the reason and interface for Red working with the FBI, what it is about her? Is she great or even good at her job? Oh goodness no. Is she a compelling character; fascinating to watch? Hardly. Does the actress give compelling performances that pull you in no matter what? Ha ha, no. It does seem like they've spent five seasons trying to convince us how awesome her character is, when really she is a dull wet blanket most of the time. They also write her very inconsistently. She could have died, and like they do every time Liz is kidnapped or missing again, Red could have worked with Aram on the blacklisters. I enjoy watching those two together. They could have found some other reason than Liz for Red to continue working with the FBI, if only to avenge her death and continue on her legacy. I wanted to like her character, and every so often think maybe they'll write her in a direction where I could, but then, nope.
  7. I've been on-again/off-again as far as Tom based on how they decided to write his character in a given arc. He was sadly always plot service rather than having decent consistency as a character. Still, with him gone they should have let Liz die there too from the fall from the high chair. She's been dead weight for most of the show, as wooden things often are. Her character reminds me so much of Agent Lisbon from The Mentalist. Mostly someone to say no to the lead. If they really wanted to shake things up kicking them both would have done it. It is The Blacklist, not the Agent Keen show. Red would be really out of control, and they could contrive a reason for him to keep working with the FBI and vice versa. It would probably be much more exciting and unpredictable than the at least half-season of wallowing and never-ending mystery most no longer care that much about. Bonus points if they made Ressler realize his hostility toward Red was partly latent attraction all along, and he's been denying to himself that he's bi and likes bad boys. Red and Ressler end up as an awkward couple. Now all that would shake up a show. :)
  8. It seemed like the implication was that while Garrison was now President and apparently hadn't been able to be an active "witch" lately, that he was still a witch. What that means in the larger context of the episode, one can conclude for themselves. Regardless, it was a funny quick end to the episode, well, until Heidi...
  9. Not only did Cartman say he'd have the guy's badge for that, the detective interrupts and says, "Whoa. Whoa. Not cool, Rick. Not cool! ... Sorry folks, sorry." The funny was Cartman being Cartman by trying to get her snatched that way. During the police station scene, if anything, one could argue Parker and Stone were emphasizing that victim blaming is not cool. Did you manage to miss the numerous sexual assault accusations made against then-candidate Trump prior to the election last year, and that they have been in the news again the past few weeks?
  10. There's been discussion in earlier episode threads with no clear answer. I'm not sure if they are just writing their interaction to whatever fits the show's overall plot each week, or if they are making a point. Things we've seen Cartman show irritation at are that she never stops talking, always wants to discuss their feelings, won't just go along with whatever he wants, interrupts him when he's in the middle of things with his friends, and now, that she takes forever to get ready. Really, for a character as ridiculously selfish as Cartman, it should be no surprise that he isn't going to put up with someone who isn't completely subservient to him. Remembering back to school days, several guys had some of those reactions to dating girls. They wanted a girlfriend, or thought they did, but weren't ready to find time for someone else. It could even be that they are writing in things that are bugging them about women in their own lives. If so, I'd say to those women, run. Although, after this episode, I'd be ready to break up with Heidi myself. :)
  11. It isn't so much they are refusing, as feeling they can't compete with reality. How sad is that? “It’s tricky now because satire has kind of become reality,” Parker said. “It’s really hard to make fun of and in the last season of South Park, which just ended a month-and-a-half ago, we were really trying to make fun of what was going on but we couldn’t keep up and what was actually happening was much funnier than anything we could come up with.” “So we decided to kind of back off and let them do their comedy and we’ll do ours.” https://coed.com/2017/02/02/south-park-creators-donald-trump-hard-to-make-fun-of-season-20-trey-parker-matt-stone-interview/
  12. Apparently there is a thing where people have wanted to block him on Facebook, and found it was impossible to block him. Seems they ran with the idea of unblockable as unstoppable, and mocked that with a Kung Fu parody of him who couldn't be blocked. Really, any mocking of the head of Facebook, who used to hand out business cards with "I'm CEO bitch" printed on them, seems fine by me.
  13. Can't speak for your sanity either way, but the guy was a tool. The wall was already painted. Let the teen have his art. Whether the wall is painted over now or someday when the teen moves out, what's the difference? He was overly aggressive for a step that should have been trying to make a new situation work rather than using any excuse to exert authority. He also implied he was going to leave them because he 'could not take much more of this' or some such. Total tool.
  14. I am relieved that DiNozzo-lite, as I think of him, is gone for now, though I see in the episode info he'll be back for a few episodes later in the season. Yes, I'm way behind on this show. It was fun to see him ditched, to a job with none of the glory he was after also.
  15. The disappearance of Kara is probably the most infuriating thing to me about the ending. Her vanishing from a field while Lee was feet away from her seems to require divine powers. She was clearly really there at some point past her death because she did things, so she wasn't just an imagining all along. So we're left with a god who is apparently all powerful, that Kara was an angel? I could be okay with that being the answer; that in the BSG universe the one true god could do such things. However, then that seems to mean god is a major ass! Let billions be killed by the cylons in a pre-emptive genocide just to start the cycle all over again? When such a powerful god could tip its hand on the scales here and there and prevent the whole mess? Feh. The story would be better in my view if Kara had just gotten to continue on with her life, or just died since her task was complete, but leaving a body. If not for the Kara issue I've also toyed with a scenario for how god could have fit into the story without being supernatural, and perhaps it still could. There would just need to be tech to disintegrate Kara's body silently in a matter of moments and let the atomized remnants blow away / fall to the ground. Or perhaps the most plausible way I've thought of so far: Her body remained on the ship headed for the sun, and from that point on she was only appearing to be there in others' minds. As the story says this has all happened before and will happen again. So what if god were really an ancient cylon, along the lines of a hybrid, with a ship or ships and knowledge and powers amassed over countless lifetimes that we can barely begin to imagine? One episode showed us a cylon elder from the current generation. If the technological children of humanity improve themselves to where they are virtually the same as humans, then interbreed with a human, and that baby becomes a new Eve who seeds the genetic pool for an entire new civilization of humans... Then humans are cylons and cylons are humans, and the interbreeding is really more like a repeated evolution of the species through sexual reproduction, albeit a bit incestuous. So the idea that god could project Six into the mind of Baltar and ultimately let others share visions could be a remnant of biological tech that is part of all humans, whose species has already been through this human/cylon cycle before. It could also explain Kara essentially being downloaded when she died in order to bring her back, and the tech to create bodies is well established. If you can download people, why couldn't you also read their thoughts, which would explain how a hybrid watched Kendra Shaw's life. It could mean hybrids get their oracle like capabilities by a fragmented interface with god, who through peoples' minds could see all. So the only thing god would have to do that's a little different is have a replacement Viper built for Kara. Yet if you can create bodies virtually indistinguishable from naturally born humans, is it going to be that hard to use tech to build a Viper if you've been watching humanity since before it achieved flight? Regardless of the origin of the one true god in the story, what is the deal with it? Why make or let this happen over and over again? Is it the way of forcing the species to grow and improve, through struggle and conflict? Do things improve much if it completely reboots and starts over each time? Is it something that god does try to prevent but it happens anyway, the way none of us can prevent our children from making their own mistakes no matter how we try? Is god just an ass? Or is god waiting for a version of humans that is compassionate enough toward its own sentient creations that the cycle is broken? Any version of humanity that fails the test dies out and the loop repeats. That seems the most likely, and such a god could be obsessed with finally getting things right. All the suffering endured could get rationalized away as people only having the blessings of the lives they got in the first place due to god's efforts to keep the cycle repeating. This is how I explain the ending for myself, and it manages to merge the technological with the god and angels explanation that otherwise doesn't fit great into my general idea of science fiction. I find it satisfying. Could Moore and company have been going for this? Perhaps, but it feels like that would give them too much credit, considering it has been admitted they made things up as they went along. Also, omitting the planned lines "It would require mankind in all its flaws to have learned from its mistakes" and "I think I'll take that bet. What are the stakes?" that were to have been said before "Silly me. Silly silly me" makes the final scene of the show incomprehensible. Why do that? So either they didn't know what they were doing, or they just wanted us utterly confused.
×
×
  • Create New...