dwmarch

Well, I have to say that as much as I like this show and Jeremy Renner's performance, this season is dragging ass so far. Part three of "everyone is unhappy and no one can do anything about it". I guess what we are seeing here is the power paradigm shifting away from Mike but thus far nothing interesting is replacing it. I will take a moment to appreciate that the brutality has been toned down a bit from last season. Skinny Pete's wife just gets jumped by the Russian mooks and then found dead and fortunately we don't dwell on her long enough to see exactly what they did to her. Having said that, one problem I am running into here is that we don't have a real plot within the prison other than Bunny wants to leave so there's no impact to various other prisoners getting killed. We got to see two prison murders but not why this is happening. Is there a new player about to emerge? One of the prisoners said the black gangs had united (well he said "we're the All Blacks now" so maybe they are starting a rugby team). The only other time I have seen that happen on a TV show (The Shield), it was bad news. The one prison plotline that I thought was an interesting contrast was Ian talking to that serial killer. That guy gets a veggie burger (no onions) and a drink, cops will come from other states to hear what he has to say and he is told he's doing a good job (in helping the police recover the various parts of one of his many victims). What's the difference with this guy? Well, he's white. We saw various characters not happy to discover that Milo escaped. They still haven't thought of checking out that church to see if he's hanging out right inside the front door. There's even street parking! No guards, nobody doing church stuff either. Just Milo, sitting around waiting for his least competent goon to bring him 14 million dollars. Well, somebody has it now and so begins the game of hot potato. I wonder if Mike took it himself. He's got the connections to be able to call the one guy who works at the Kingstown PD lockup and say "open the door for me and then go away for a while" and I can't say they've established that the same would be true for Milo. There was one bit that I liked but it was a very understated moment. When Mike goes to visit Bunny's cousin she grills him on the relationship between the two and Mike declines to answer. I like the hint at a deep history between them and I'd be curious to hear more or see a flashback to what brought them together in the first place. I also thought it was funny that Bunny's cousin wrote Mike off so easily. Did you not hear about the time he went over to Bunny's place and threw a grenade at him to get his attention? Did you not hear about the time the Peckerwoods messed with Mike's gal and were all found dead the same day? Maybe this is some nuance of gangsta shit where the guy who doesn't brag is the one you should be afraid of but the lady was acting like she had never heard of Mike before. Then again, I guess her view is tinted by the fact that she's only ever seen Mike with his thumb up his ass.

I follow 92 shows myself and it's quite a wall of text if they aren't split up into alphabetical categories. I'm happy to report that the hitboxes around topics have been fixed so you can now click anywhere in the box instead of having to click specifically on the letters. It's a small quality of life thing but appreciated nonetheless!

There was also a plot that they didn't spend a lot of time on where the police "found" Eugene's body (actually just some random dude they pulled out of the morgue) so that the Mayor could say there was no murderer running around town. I'm not sure if the timing lines up precisely on these plots so while it might be that Big Mo thought Eugene was dead because that's what the Mayor said it could also be that she knows he was alive when the Mayor announced that he wasn't. So she might end up using Eugene as a political pawn if she has to put pressure on the Mayor.

I like the NCIS: Hawaii team and I root for them but they are kind of the worst investigators. Like Kai being so sure that AJ blew up that meth lab and then finding out that no, it was actually someone with a totally different agenda. Kai really likes to build the narrative he prefers and then bend the facts to fit which as I understand is something you never, ever want a real cop to do. He does it a bunch of times in this episode and it's only because of plot armor that he ends up being mostly right. I guess those civilians in the diner were all enemies of AJ so none of them decided to broadcast this rogue Federal Agent assaulting a dude and I guess the public is also okay with NCIS sweating (and/or swatting) the wife to put the pressure on. The wife is guilty of the same thing Kai's father is guilty of: not reading the fine print. Also in the "Rampart scandal in the making" file, Kai shot and possibly killed a bunch of people too. A cop murders a bunch of gangsters to protect his father who was involved with the gangsters. But it was self defense! Nothing to see here! I knew everyone was going to split up and end up coming up dry on the search for AJ while Kai went to the one place he was bound to show up. If one other person had gone with Kai it would have been a much different confrontation! Lucy's Carrier mini-case was kind of silly but I loved all of her outfits. Sometimes this show tries to squeeze her into tiny pants that are half a size too small for her. In this episode she was dressed in clothes that actually fit and she looked great!

The view is so squishy! I was getting used to the layout from the previous update but now all the topics are mushed together again. I hope the topics will eventually be grouped and separated alphabetically like they were before.

I agree, not the best episode this week. It was mostly characters going to each other to ask for things they asked for last week. Except now it's urgent and everybody is mad. Poor Skinny Pete. He finally gets out of Albuquerque and settles down and ends up getting himself murdered by Russian gangsters. We get to see that several of his fingers were removed so I guess he continued negotiating? Mike's mom could have done a bit more prep work before talking to the juveniles. What I got from her lesson was "if you live to be as old as I am, you'll be filled with gratitude when someone mugs you and only takes your money." I guess we'll see next week but why play hot potato with the bearer bonds? The pawn shop guy had the right idea. Build a bonfire, make the problem go away. But it looks like Mike has an idea for flushing Milo out. Hey Mike, have you tried looking for him at that giant Russian church?

When Mike found that bus full of dead people buried in the field he was on a fetch quest for Milo to find $14 million in bearer bonds. I remember that because the only other time I have heard of bearer bonds is Die Hard and the scene made me wonder if Milo was planning to offer them to Hans Gruber if Hans would break him out of jail.

I was confused by this but I haven't watched the Critical Role episodes so perhaps it would be obvious if I had seen those. Garmelie turned into someone else at the end and I felt like I was supposed to recognize who it was. Please feel free to spoiler code it if it hasn't come up in the show yet. Grog is finally finding his purpose and I like the direction it has gone in but I don't think he could have passed that first test on where his strength came from. It was a one on one battle with another big dude. How was his "protect the little people" ethos supposed to influence that fight? I guess he was supposed to say "I don't have time for this, I've got to go help my friends"? I imagine we'll come back to it later.

Episode 4 is in the bag and now we're starting to see the larger plot unfold. Edit: spoiler tagging my comments as I seem to be seeing the episodes before they air.

Lee Delemere (played by Carmen Ejego) has only been mentioned once so far this season. In the first episode Eugene tried to call her but just got her voicemail. I'm not sure if she's going to show up this season or not.

Aww, damn! I thought this was a great show and I would have been happy to see more. But I guess the sun came up, all the vampires died and the cops hauled everyone else away.

Region-free trailer (or at least it works in Canada, your jurisdiction may vary): I'm cautiously optimistic. I think the main fault of season 2 was that it had too many ideas packed into too small of a space. So far from this we know we've got the TNG crew, Moriarty, Lore and some new villains including Amanda Plummer (whom I kind of hope says "any of you Starfleet pricks move..."). There's also something going on with the young human-looking dude who has a connection to Picard. Let's hope this is all a little less chaotic than last season where all the bouncing between plots lessened them all.

Ah, thanks, this makes sense now. I did see that the other gang leaders signaled to Bunny but I still thought he should be expecting betrayal from any or all of them. And he did, he was just being efficient. It is after all, hotter than a MF in there. Sorry I doubted you Bunny, you know what you're doing.

Bunny came up with as good of a plan as he could there except for the part where he just sat around hoping for the best. Like does he think none of the other gang leaders had similar things in mind? Or that they wouldn't notice when all the guards turned their backs at once? Kyle was quite adamant last episode that he didn't want Mike's problem (specifically Iris) becoming his problem. Bearing that in mind I thought it was funny that he came back begging Mike for a task and all Mike has for him is "help me figure out where the Russian mob boss is". Yes, that will go well I am sure. Speaking of which, all I know about Russian gangsters is what I have seen on TV but even I know that if you're looking for the Russian mob boss he's either at the strip club or at the church. And that is one big-ass church. However, I think Mike is playing Milo. He "put on a cape" to go try to rescue Iris and beat that one goon down (twice even!) while asking where she is. There was no real reason for him to do that if she is working at that club trying to make $5k an evening. So I am pretty sure he already knows where she is and just wants the Russians to think he doesn't know. Otherwise everyone is just going stupid over a gal who likes to prove she's not worth the effort. Wouldn't be the first time in history this has happened but I hope these characters are a little smarter than that. I think this could be factor for sure. Mike is insisting that everyone play by the drug dealer's rules and the cops aren't having it. So they knock over Bunny's grandma's place to assert dominance and make Mike's life more difficult.

Clancy wrote that book, it's called Executive Orders.

I think this is what passes for foreshadowing on this show. Jesse's daughter was kidnapped in an episode and he wasn't happy about it but he didn't go all John Wick either. I guess his darkness had the week off.

I'm surprised we don't have a thread for this movie yet, it's getting good reviews as of this moment. Trailer: I'm pretty sure this movie is still in theaters although I watched it at home. I'm not a horror fan per se but this movie kept it mild for being in the horror genre. More Terminator than Chucky. The trailer telegraphs one particular kill that you would think is going to be really nasty (involving a power washer) but it was fairly discreet in the movie. There is some substantial subject matter in the movie about grief and loss. The young girl who loses her parents doesn't know how to deal with the loss and ends up becoming best friends with this android who was programmed with everything except empathy. When M3GAN starts researching death on her own and the characters quickly tech-splain to her that she should not worry about it you know they done messed up. As with most movie AI that spends a day on the internet unsupervised, we go from there straight to murder time fun time. Most of the characters in this movie are not at all sympathetic so it's not terribly sad when M3GAN catches up to them. Being the Terminator fan that I am, I was mostly rooting for her. I appreciate how they gave her some limitations. She's not Terminator-strong for example because she's small so she's limited by physics. She buries something five feet deep because she's only four feet tall. Some of the setups are super obvious. The big, tough looking early model robot of course comes into play at the end. But they did whiff on a couple of obvious references. They had a fastball over the plate opportunity for "get away from her, you bitch" and although it would have been clunky there was a moment where I said out loud "come with me if you want to live". One aspect that didn't work for me was M3GAN talking about how she used to be such good friends with Gemma. Okay, I know they had the whole Primary User aspect but Gemma was added as a second Primary early on and M3GAN spent most of the movie talking at her rather than to her. M3GAN is a super social engineer but never really tried with Gemma so the "betrayal" felt a little out of left field.

I'm glad the plot with Alex's girlfriend was wrapped up nicely and in a single episode. Also Tennant is a great mom. The main plot didn't make a lot of sense to me. Someone was murdered because of something that happened overseas back in the day but the original witness didn't want to cooperate so somehow the monk-Marine agreed to take the fall? At least the obvious bad guy was obvious for once. I was sure the helpful Marine CID lady would be involved somehow. I was waiting for Ernie to come rushing in saying it was actually snowing in Mexico City yesterday and those aren't standard issue Marine combat boots!

He tried, in the most oblique way possible. But Charlie chose not to hear him. I feel like there is no way they cannot know but I agree this comes across weirdly in the show. Babies need a lot of stuff and they make a lot of noise. Putting the baby in the other room is not sufficient to hide it. Maybe Fia's gangster relatives have disavowed the baby and chosen never to speak of it but how are we supposed to know that?

"Sweden, Switzerland... whatever cracker-ass country babysit the other cracker-ass countries" was hilarious. Remember Mike, we're not sending him to jail for his knowledge of European geography. Mike may not be as smooth of a "Mayor" as his brother was but he's getting there. I liked his well-timed use of humor when talking to Evelyn. I assume there is more to come with Kyle's unfortunate traffic stop. The driver tried to shoot the cop because why? With a baby in the vehicle the dude thought his best option was to blast his way out of a traffic ticket? There had better be 800lbs of meth in that boat. So Iris knew where Milo was all along? And all of these cops she's been hanging around with never thought to ask her if Milo had a secret lair somewhere? I know they thought he was dead because of the riot but still.

I don't think the show would be brave enough to go this way but this is not the first time I have thought that Tennant and Whistler would make a much better couple. Fortunately NCIS Hawaii has installed Plot Armor®️ on their SUVs. Good thing Jesse didn't bring his family-mobile, would have been awkward trying to explain the .50 cal holes to the wife and kids. Or is it kid? I know he has a daughter because we've seen her but I feel like he might also have a son too. But I don't remember the details of his family life because we aren't constantly being dragged into some contrived nonsense involving them, unlike some agents... Same here, this plot is just dumb false tension. OMG you must talk to the FBI so they don't think you're a criminal! Because that's how that works! You explain to them that you borrowed money from the gangster because your son let you down (real dick move there, Dad) and so you just had to take dirty money in exchange for favors instead. Because if your restaurant went out of business you'd evaporate or some shit. But at no point was money laundered. The FBI will believe you on this provided you invite them to come and talk to you and tell them in person how innocent you are.

I wanted to like this movie but ultimately I think it's another entry in the "Wow, DC sure makes great trailers!" series. Black Adam the character was really bland and the supporting cast was alright but never more than the sum of its parts. The highlight for me was five seconds of Harcourt rocking that beautiful patent leather trenchcoat. Other than that it was an entirely forgettable movie where various characters travel all over the place and somehow never end up actually going anywhere.

I guess it must be Friday at midnight somewhere so I won't spoiler code but I will keep episode two commentary vague. There is a weird beauty to this show that wasn't present in the first season. I feel like we are getting more out of these characters and what we are getting is better. There was no action in this episode at all but I enjoyed everything that was being set up here. Well, the US Attorney is still way over the top but everything else seems to be going smoothly so far. Fia gets line of the episode with "climb down off the cross, Jesus needs it back". Ah Fia, so you are a gangsta after all I see.

"Tech? Is that his name, just Tech?" was comedy gold.

Renewed for season 7: https://deadline.com/2023/01/seal-team-renewed-season-7-paramount-plus-movie-1235225561/ Be advised, there are spoilers for the end of season 6 if you're not there yet.