Lebanna

Picked up for season 2! https://tvline.com/2023/02/09/the-peripheral-renewed-season-2-amazon/ It’s so nice to see a sci-fi show actually get another season and this has been my favorite of the last year. Good acting, interesting mystery. So happy about this.

Ha! As if Royal Holloway is actually ‘in London’. I mean, it’s part of the University of London and it’s an absolutely beautiful uni, but come on, show. It’s about an hour from central London by train on a good day. Although it certainly wouldn’t have been so glamorous for Joe to be hanging around in Slough. Roll on the weird tweedy British stereotypes.

This show is cancelled. https://tvline.com/2023/01/31/dr-phil-cancelled-ending-season-22-cbs-final-episodes/ Twenty years too late, but hey.

That’s awful. She was so brilliant in taking over as the Borg Queen and she must have filmed all of this show while sick. I had absolutely no idea. Just an incredible performance made even more amazing by this realisation. What a loss and what a tragedy.

Meh, just realised that this season 16 seams to have disappeared off Disney+ here. Going to have to wait a month until Paramount finally gets released here in February, but I really hate that they’ve just taken the season down half way through. Ridiculous. What a pain.

Yeah, I don’t get the García hate, honestly. She is somewhat the female version of Reid, she’s damaged and guilty for her mother and step-father’s demise just as Reid lived with his having put his mother in an institution, years after his father left, so he could go away and live his life, without becoming her carer, as perhaps society thought he should. This is borne out later when it becomes clear that his mother, through no fault of her own, was physically abusing him, later thinking that he was a ‘clumsy kid’ because she didn’t remember hurting him. In García’s case, she becomes a hacker and grief councillor, trying to make up for what she once got wrong in ‘causing’ her parents’ deaths. They’re both meant to be slightly emotionally stunted from the guilt they carry and therefore stuck in an emotionally somewhat set-back state which they illustrate through their deep innocence and in overly caring about those around them. In Reid, for example, that comes out as researching childbirth in case JJ went into labor in the field. In García, that’s her constant fear of any one of them coming to harm. I’ve always hoped both of them would end up happy in this show and Tyler plays into that in the sense that he is also guilt-ridden and stunted. Kind of hope he and García make it work, but it seems obvious there’s going to be a twist as the relationship has developed way too quickly. I know it’s uncool, but I just can’t hate her. She’s a little pool of light on this show and makes me smile.

Cancelled. https://tvline.com/2023/01/02/1899-cancelled-at-netflix/ Makes no sense, this show was the biggest non-Wednesday thing in most markets for weeks and weeks. Stupid Netflix. Again.

Well, with the title being what it was, this was the only way it could ever end. Loved the crushing disappointment of the Grief Groupies at Jen naming her kid Joey instead of Judy. You don’t have to name your kid after someone to remember them. I loved how they showed Judy accepting her fate and working hard to be pleased for Jen that she actually somehow got Judy’s entire perfect dream life. It’s beautiful to see female friendships portrayed so wonderfully and women as emotionally complicated but not jealous harpies. Judy going out with the tide and the dawn was lovely and I just hope she had taken all the pills first. What a hilarious, gorgeous series.

Confirmed: https://tvline.com/2022/07/13/criminal-minds-reboot-paramount-plus-release-date-revival-new-episodes/ And all those those not expected to return are not returning, so I couldn’t care less about this thing.

Well, the classic answer to whether you are one of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas or not is whether you have walked away from your relatively comfortable Western life, devoted yourself in person to helping those in the third world, fighting for social justice or giving all your wealth away to the poor in your community. Otherwise, if we can block out how good life is in comparison to the lives of so many tiny children who live in utter squalor, in constant hunger and sick from disease, often working horrific jobs from a very young age in countries where we import our nice cheap goods from… Well, we didn’t walk away. We didn’t want our lives to be worse, we didn’t want to risk dying ourselves, we didn’t want to pay extra money that would put our financial position in jeopardy, to improve someone else’s life. So it makes sense that this episode would have a dark ending. Because it’s true.

Well… this is exactly why I feel like there might be a vague hope from the show runners for a season 2. Book spoilers:

Yes, it’s just a plot point that seems quite mysterious and wasn’t tied up. I would say that the house had clearly travelled back, as the street didn’t even exist yet. Or maybe it always just sits there as it is, back to the beginning of time. Mostly just unnoticed, like the TARDIS. If Apple do something like Netflix did with Russian Doll and come back to these characters with a new season in a few years, I hope the body doesn’t turn out to be Kirby. In the book the previous owner had been a Polish guy, if I remember correctly. Sometimes he would be dead, sometimes Harper would have got rid of him and sometimes he’d be alive again when Harper got back. Also, the book seemed to imply a Quantum Leap type of rule where Harper could only go as far as 1993 because that would have been/was where he was always destined to die in his 90s (or not). Of course, Quantum Leap didn’t even stick to that rule, so there’s no reason why this show would. But yes, 1848 seems quite mysterious and it would be great if they have more story planned and we get some answers about what the house actually is (because it’s obviously not really a house). And of course the book has a very different ending than the show for them all. So there’s no connection with the book. The fact that the house still exists, Harper isn’t dead in this new reality, Kirby’s role as powerful ruler of the house has not been defined - outside of obviously telling Klara and the older woman (and possibly his other future victims for the next 70 years of his natural life) what to say or do to get rid of Harper from their lives back in his original timeline - Kirby and Dan don’t really know each other yet in this reality and there are mysteries like the hanging person, who/what built the house, why the realities shift in the exact ways that they do or the cause of the quantum entanglement of people killed by the owner of the house, all left on the table, which suggests the possibility of continuing the show in some form. I’d happily watch a series about the next 70 years of Harper’s life while he keeps trying to kill people who turn out to be completely ready to fight him and quite angry about him trying to murder them, while Kirby keeps destroying his reality every time as punishment. But even if there isn’t any more, it was a nice ending.

Well, for once I actually enjoyed this series far more than the book, it was easier to connect to the characters in this series and they were much more damaged by more relatable somehow. Plus the shifting universes were more fun and made it significantly more mysterious. Plus Kirby and Dan being so much closer in age and having less of a romantic connection was definitely an improvement. It was a relatively emotionally satisfying conclusion, everyone got everything they should have had back, except Kirby, who like Harper, in owning the house seemed to have disappeared from her own life and everyone else’s. Unless Kirby should have been working at another paper entirely, because she definitely didn’t get her original successful career path back from the moment she lost it, as everyone else did, or Dan would have recognised her. I do feel like this series could have been a couple of episodes longer and explained more clearly how Harper’s time travelling sprees and killing women right before they achieved their potential was changing the path of everyone’s lives. It felt like there was a clever unravelling of that mystery where they find all the ways that time was caused to spiral that should have been the episode before this last one. And was it Kirby who was hanging from the banister at the beginning of the episode for the botanical collector to find?

Maybe Wesley is just their in-house headhunter, or their head of HR. Actually, it’s not a bad test. If you can be recruited on the spot by (Shut up) Wesley, you probably really want to get out of your life*. *No disrespect to the actor, who I assume is absolutely lovely.

The Guinan thing is a massive plot hole as in those episodes she makes a huge thing about how meeting Picard in the 1890s changes her whole life forever and is one of the most pivotal moments of her whole existence. Which admittedly, doesn’t actually make sense when you watch how little interaction they have overall in the episodes. But hey. The only handwavium available is that time was in flux when they arrived from the ‘wrong’ future, so at that moment because that future was still in place at the moment they met, 1890 hadn’t happened. Then, by doing what had always been done (almost) instead of something different that created the Confederacy, they reset everything except the 1890 mission, Mark Twain and Data losing his head in the past. But really this kind of explanation means waving like you are doing jazz hands. They screwed up. Am I thrilled that Star Trek’s first Spanish speaking Latin American main character was pretty much rebranded as a stereotypical Latin Lover all season and then got MURDERED IN A BAR FIGHT? What the actual hell, Star Trek. Do better.

That was before she saw the costume she’d get and that girl’s pride at the idea of an Egyptian superhero, though.

Agree it was a bit rushed - so far I’ve felt like all the 6 episode shows should have been 8 as it would let the characters have a bit more space to breathe and wouldn’t make the last episodes so frantic. So Jake is a Spanish speaking murderous billionaire? Love it. High school must have been an absolute mess in that case, if Marc was switching from American in math class to badly done British in history and then acing Spanish class but with a terrible attitude to his classmates. I would pay to see that. Love Layla’s costume, of course Taweret would give her avatar a really fabulous costume; she seems like the most kindly of the gods so far so she’d want them to be really happy with their powers and appearance. I enjoy Marc and Steven getting an extra fish so they both have one and presume they will have an AntMan/Wasp situation with Layla, although I don’t see Marc letting Steven get further than first base which will probably be an issue as Steven obviously loves Layla just as much as he does (as they are just aspect of the same person). I like the central idea that, just like the gods appearing as aspects of themselves across different lands and times, with different names, people are always showing different aspects of themselves in life. Although obviously not usually in such a dysfunctional way. The show also sets me wondering if whoever takes up ‘The Falcon’ designation now that Sam is Captain America, might end up being an avatar for the god Horus, who was the original Falcon.

And I just realised that now Ricardo will think that Ríos is his Rick Sánchez as he’s the crazy guy who whisks the kid away to a spaceship and terrifying adventures. Except that Ricardo is literally Rick Ramírez. Is this a BIG REVEAL? Find out next…

And of course if you add all the Pickards and Picardos out there, it’s not unusual at all in about half of the world… Plus, since Picard was born around three hundred years after 2022, with the amount of global travel there is now, he’d actually be related to just about everyone alive at the moment.

Although we have never heard of Renée Picard before this season, what they have done is retrospectively named JL’s tragic young nephew René after her. That could lead to a certain sense of catharsis for him, if he able to protect this Renée and therefore at least René’s presumed pride in his namesake ancestor. The name René means ‘reborn’. It’s good that Renée is an aunt rather than a direct ancestor, as at least there is a small sense of jeopardy for her. Plus, we won’t have to see JL forget how to play the guitar and then start to fade away if she doesn’t get on that flight. The Picard genealogy has always been a bit weird. On one hand, they loudly celebrate all the cool ancestors (while forgetting about the ones who committed a bunch of atrocities), but on the other hand, recently anyone who didn’t want to spend their life working at a vineyard got shunned. It’s an odd dichotomy. Maurice Picard was clearly such a bad apple. Also odd is how sketchy their knowledge of 21st century history is, compared to the amount of information available about baseball statistics of the same era.

I loved the scene with the punk from Voyage Home and his update of his classic song ‘I still hate you and I still berate you…’ And then him touching his neck and apologising for his music this time. But then later, I realised that it doesn’t quite work because this guy was never Vulcan death pinched by Spock, since in this reality the events of that movie never happened. So I guess we have to assume that it’s just that he got older and learned some manners, instead of it being a pivotal moment in his life.

TVLine has an article about how this will be the season of ‘romance’ for Picard. https://tvline.com/2022/03/01/star-trek-picard-season-2-spoilers-patrick-stewart-john-de-lancie-interview-q/ There’s a mention of who one of his romantic partners might be, so if you don’t want spoilers, don’t read it. Fingers crossed that this season is way more than just Q messing with Picard as in ‘Tapestry’ or creepy faux-romantic dream sequences like ENT’s ‘A Night In Sickbay’. I have such high hopes for this show. It was interesting that the theme of the TNG movies was less dealing with the themes of aging, loss, brotherhood and death, as in the TOS movies series, and more about Picard coming to terms with the idea that he would never be able to have a stereotypical close family life, with a wife and children, while Riker and Troy finally got their plan for that back on the road. In the end it seemed like perhaps Data, dead or alive, or at one point perhaps even B4, would fill the emotional place of a son in Picard’s life, and last season certainly didn’t rule that out with his love for Data and fight for Data’s ‘children’. But that is a closed chapter now and from an ongoing narrative standpoint it makes sense that the dream of finding a true romantic partner would be something that he has still never resolved or let himself give up hope for. BTW, apart from Gabriel Bell and all that, wasn’t 2024 also the year of Irish Reunification? That episode was censored in the UK for years…

Ok, this was the episode where it looks like they tried to get too clever with Helen’s IVF situation and messed it all up. I’m assuming that because of the story constraints, Helen needs to be free to have either of her men as her sperm donor next season, so they needed to have her suddenly seem to decide to freeze her four unfertilised eggs instead of having them fertilised and going through a selection process and then trying to have them implanted. Helen doesn’t seem to even have worked with the clinic to pick a sperm donor, as would be normal in the US. We’re missing the scenes of the ladies going through her donor options over drinks! That could have been absolutely hilarious. So that’s why I’m assuming they are keeping the IVF thing for whoever she picks as the father next season. Since she is doing this as a single woman, this would typically be a more or less five day process fertilising the eggs with donor sperm and then of waiting to see which fertilised egg looked strongest and then, if there was one that looked promising, getting it into the uterus as quickly as possible. Or possibly if she didn’t want a baby immediately, freezing her embryos which have a much greater chance of survival than just eggs. With only four viable eggs extracted and wanting to have already given birth by next summer (a pregnancy normally takes at least 40 weeks!), it’s crazy to have made the character apparently freeze her eggs for no reason. Unfertilised and frozen, with all likelihood only half (at the very most) of those eggs would survive being defrosted and then her chances of getting one to fertilise and implant are basically zero. She might even lose the one that could have worked because it didn’t defrost correctly. Maybe they’ll amaze me next season and write that Helen has gone through with an unknown donor attempt. But after this episode, I doubt it (although at the rate that he’s gaining kids all over the place, if she want a guaranteed pregnancy she should ask Bill to donate!)

I don’t know anything about sign language (although I plan to learn to sign one day) but what bugged me about that scene was how the Jodie kept looking over at Cal while Maddie was speaking to her - if she hadn’t know what the other character was saying because of the script, I would think that looking in the wrong direction would have made lip reading very difficult. It was really nice to see a deaf character in a scene where nobody mentioned her being deaf or made a thing about it. A few years ago you never used to see that in shows like this, in the past they always had to make it dramatic or some kind of patronising ‘learning moment’. I really like how the rough edges of Helen’s fertility struggles are being shown in this season. The sadness, wild hopes, disappointments which feel so insurmountable and the general constant up-and-down of it all. So far it feels like a fair representation of this frankly quite traumatic part of life. I would still have thought having one of the ladies go with her to look at the follicle count might be more comfortable than a new romantic partner (especially since she would have needed to get fully lower half naked before she got on the table and then the doctor would have to stick a reasonably sized, lubricated probe right up the vagina, so even at a nice clinic with a guy who is a paramedic, it’s… not the most glamorous moment) but their discussion was quite sweet.

I think I’d much rather watch ‘Rabbi Jen and the City’ at this point.