owenthurman

The only water in the forest is the Flood …is that how it went?

Was this a series finale?

I suspect that version is still butchered. When I watched it live, there were frequent interruptions of technical-difficulty screens, and then the show would resume missing a minute or two. Whoever ripped this may have edited those “we’ll be right back” screens out, but they would still be missing the scenes that were supposed to play. So for even those who fly beneath the skull-and-crossbones flag, the best bet would be to wait til spring.

ok, I watched all twelve episodes now. Since I’m probably one of, like, fifty people in the world who sat through it on Tubi, let me give a spoiler-free overview: Is it worth watching? Yes. It’s good. Very good. Is there closure? More or less. It opens some potential storylines for seasons that will never come, but it does bring the season’s major storylines to completion. Should I watch it on Tubi? NO. ABSOLUTELY NOT. It’ll be on Roku TV in the spring. The Tubi thing drops connection so you miss scenes. It’s in low-resolution. You are forced to watch it at bizarre times in long and punishing blocks. It has commercials. Since it wasn’t filmed for commercial tv, it doesn’t have act breaks for where commercials should go; it’ll be right in the middle of a scene, or a line of dialogue, and then suddenly commercials. Wait a few months and watch it on a better service.

Tubi will air them again, on March 2nd and 3rd. It's a hugely inconvenient and dumb way to release them.

Yes, it was good. But the low-definition video (like a VHS recording of 90s tv), the commercials, the intermissions, and the logo make for a pretty unpleasant viewing experience. The show has always been, like, a mixture of an Edwardian social portrait and The X-Men. Season 1a felt like it had more X-Men in the mix, season 1b feels like a little more of the Edwardian drawing-room melodrama. There's a couple really memorable moments. There's more character work, like childhood flashbacks, but I don't know if I really needed to see that.

I watched eps 7-9! Yay! But the streaming system is awful. Did anyone else watch them?

“The Alchemist wanted to create a more powerful human. Many died in the process, but in the end, she created a miracle: the Warriors and Guardians. Xiao’s design was for a better world.” So, the writers embrace Nazi eugenics now? It’s ok that “many died” from human experimentation because the ends justify the means? And then the next lines call for racial purity. I’m hoping all this gets subverted, because it’s looking pretty awful. Edited: whoops, I should probably make it a point to watch the episode to the end before commenting!

The problem with the drama of disbelief is that there’s no drama in it. Struggling to remain interested in this story when no one acts in a way I find either believable or interesting.

So the armored squadron in episode one that used explosives to attack the auction and steal the watch wanted it so badly because… it had sentimental value to Clint’s wife? I don’t follow

What was the deal with the watch?

The strengths of this show are the characters, the family, the culture, and decent fight choreography. The weakness of the show is the dull, made-up magical McGuffins: magic sword! Magic weapons! Magic forge! It’s so strange that they went to the effort to invent their own magic system and made it so cliched, when Chinese and Chinese diasporic populations are full of fascinating cultural material: hopping vampires immobilized by paper talismans pasted to their foreheads, seductive fox maidens, ghost weddings, the tales of Pu Songling, the strange creatures populating the Shan Hai Jing……

I am confused. You speak as if we’re supposed to understand what typically happens in Act 5 and 6? But Shakespeare’s plays had five acts, and most modern storytelling follows a three-act structure…. What is Act 6, in your usage?

There is a real difference between training part-time and training full-time. The person who takes a 75-minute martial arts class every Tuesday and Thursday does not receive the constant reinforcement of monastic-rules martial training, with constant drills and personal instruction from teachers. Thirty years of twice-weekly classes vs. three years of ten-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week training….

This felt SO incomplete to me. It felt like the fight needed one more significant beat for that walkout to feel realistic. Like, Master Drake needed to lose his temper, fight dirty, break his own rules, AND STILL LOSE to Nicky, for all his students to walk out on him en masse.

I've been wrong on *every single* one of my predictions so far (though I did identify the reporter as Maladie before anyone else, so, there's a sop for my ego), but that won't stop me from speculating about future stories. I think two people "hitched" a ride: Knitter, the medic from the future, is in Lord Massen's daughter, whom he locked up in the basement for all her foul talk of the future; the fanatical earth-firster guy from the future who can talk people into abandoning their causes, I am speculating, is in Primrose. We simply know less of Primrose's background than anyone else, plus, some of these episodes have been designed to have climactic battles where the person's power will make the fight memorable: the man who walks on water, the woman who can destroy things by touching them... I imagine fighting a ten-foot-tall child with a man's fanatical mind inside would be a stunner of a fight. Is this thread appropriate for speculations? Or should there be another thread for that?

She shows up for the first time in the police station. A few minutes (viewer time) later, Maladie attacks the police chief, whom Effie had just been speaking with. Maladie is arrested after Effie’s first scene.

WOW Did they skip the part where they talk about the Galanthi?

Welcome!

Margaret Tuttle doesn't exist. The show made a fake imdb page with the name of a feminist playwright from the early 20th century. I could tell you, but your experience will be SO MUCH COOLER if you watch her scene again and figure it out for yourself. Her face; her voice.

I recommend watching her scene again, paying attention to her face and voice. It’s fifteen minutes into the episode.

So, uh, did everybody take a really good look at the reporter, Effie Boyle? And listen to her voice?

We shall see. I think the person locked in the basement is Lord Massen’s wife, not his daughter. It would be consistent with the 19th century British novel tropes that are all over this show, specifically “the madwoman in the attic” of Lord Rochester from Jane Eyre.

There’s other ways it could work. They’ve met onscreen but she didn’t say a word to him, and all he said to her was, “ah, a prognosticator.” I suspect that the disgraced brother wouldn’t have been Caleb.