henke on 23/5/2020 at 05:07
Having finished watching Community (again) I will now rank the seasons from best to worst.
Season 2
Everyone's gotten into their roles, and the writing staff are firing on all cylinders. This is peak Community!
Highlights: Advanced D n' D, Basic Rocket Science, My Dinner With Andre Dinner With Abed.
Season 3
A bit more uneven than season 2, but it does have the greatest episode of Community, HECK possibly the best episode of any TV show ever: Remedial Chaos Theory, aka the timelines episode. Not only is the timeloop a fun sci-fi concept, but the way it's used to explore new crinkles in these characters is the genius of it.
Highlights: Remedial Chaos Theory, The Smashed Yam Case, The Videogame episode, THE RULE OF CHANG
Season 5
Kinda an underrated season, I think. Sure, Pierce is gone and Troy sails off with LeVar Burton after 5 episodes, but this is still a stellar (tho short) season where almost every episode is a solid hit. Jonathan Banks is a great addition as cranky criminology professor Hickey who aspires to be a cartoonist.
Highlights: The Hunt For The Ass Crack Bandit, Lava World, MeowMeowBeenz Beta Test (KOOGLER!)
Season 1
I used to think this season was very weak compared to what followed, but rewatching now I'm digging it. It takes a few episodes for everyone to get into their characters, but once they do it's good times.
Highlights: The Halloween Party where Pierce is Beastmaster and Abed is Batman, Chicken Mafia, The first paintball episode
Season 4
Showrunner Dan Harmon got kicked out at the end of Season 3 for being a huge dick, but it turned out the series really needed him. He got re-hired for the later seasons. This season is just... lacklustre.
Highlights: eh... well... Pierce's Haunted Mansion, I guess? I also kinda like the musical Puppet Therapy episode.
Season 6
Pierce, Troy, and Shirley are gone. Newcomers Frankie Dart and Elroy Patashnik never really develop into fully fleshed-out characters. But worse is that the energy has seemingly gone out of the rest of the original cast and the writers.
Highlights: The last 3 episodes are a bump in quality: Modern Espionage, Garrett's Wedding, and a very bittersweet finale.
Ahhhhh... welp. Now that I've finished rewatching The Office and Community, what's supposed to be my late-night comfort food-viewing that I can half-pay attention to while playing Jigsaw Puzzles HD on the iPad? Can't wait for Disney+ to get here so I can start watching through the Simpsons from start to finish.
henke on 25/5/2020 at 06:00
oh oh OH speaking of Community, the cast just reunited for a table read of season 5's "Cooperative Polygraphy" and it's great stuff. Such a well-written episode. Pedro Pascal stands in for Walton Goggins as Mr. Stone, and his reaction to the final act is great.
[video=youtube;V6Q_nlSULio]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6Q_nlSULio[/video]
Tocky on 25/5/2020 at 23:40
Finished Black Mirror. What a mind fuck. Literally. Back in the early eighties Omni magazine discussed ramifications of embedding computer programs in the brain but it was mostly on the value of having information at your disposal in an encyclopedic way. These guys have gone way beyond anything they dreamed of and into the land of nightmare. The stories are unflinching in their explorations of human interaction and expanded tech development. Some of it is hard to watch. Dear lord the prime minister and pig episode was so far over the line it was teeth grinding. If I have any complaint, and it's a small one, it's that I wish there were a few more like "Hang the DJ" to alleviate some of the unrelenting tension. A happy ending every so often, when inventive, is just as good as forcing us to see our darker natures. So much of it is an indictment of current societal trends and so depressingly accurate that it's crushing. But it is so clever it's also stunning and addictive.
jkcerda on 25/5/2020 at 23:50
Waco was good, won't spoil it for you guys.
Gray on 26/5/2020 at 03:05
With the lockdown here in the UK, I've been looking for more stuff to watch. Just to test a new streaming service, I tried an episode of Westworld, a show I did not have high hopes for, but I was very quickly proven wrong. It was brilliant. Well, at least season one was, season two was ok but weird, season three seemed like any other sci-fi. It's all good, but season one was done amazingly well, says me the bitter old grumpy cynic who never likes anything anywhere of anything. Do try to watch it if you haven't already done so, when it was first out 4 years ago. Yeah, I'm slow, as usual.
Also, there are new episodes out of Rick & Morty. Yay! And there's a Netflix movie now of Invader Zim. Oh, how I've missed Zim. Thank you, Omega, for introducing me to Zim.
jkcerda on 26/5/2020 at 03:10
bunch of netflix
extraction was good, but I heard they are about to fuck it up with a sequel. pre-quel I can see.
Ozarks, loved the ending to season 3
Waco, pretty good at showing how BOTH sides screwed things up.
Ragnarok, slow but still ok.
Sulphur on 26/5/2020 at 04:11
Quote Posted by henke
oh oh OH speaking of Community, the cast just reunited for a table read of season 5's "Cooperative Polygraphy" and it's great stuff. Such a well-written episode. Pedro Pascal stands in for Walton Goggins as Mr. Stone, and his reaction to the final act is great.
Oh man, this is probably nostalgia (or whatever the short-term version of it is), but I enjoyed this more than the original episode. It's great seeing everyone reunited, even if it is virtually. And they still have the same chemistry!
@Tocky: Actually, I still feel the PM episode's the best possible introduction to Black Mirror's uncanny observational skills. While it's satire, it remains something that's absolutely possible today, and it doesn't need the technological leaps most of the rest of the show explores. I think San Junipero's probably one of the happiest of the Black Mirror episodes, and not coincidentally it's also one of the best. Which reminds me, I need to check out this show called Upload faetal mentioned a little while ago. Apparently it deals with the same speculative concepts of a technological afterlife, maybe crossed with a little bit of The Good Place.
Starker on 26/5/2020 at 05:03
As sad as I was to see Screenwipe and Newswipe go (though I didn't find this year's Antiviral Wipe to be all that funny, to be honest), I'm very happy to get something like Black Mirror in return. Charlie Brooker was the person who got me to watch shows like Quatermass and Sapphire & Steel initially and after he spent so much time criticising the current state of television, it's quite interesting to see what his take on it would be.
Tocky on 26/5/2020 at 05:37
Just finished episode five of season one of Bernard Corwells "The Last Kingdom". I love this book, mostly I love all his books, but I was expecting them to draw out the story. Rather than do that they have inexplicably cut parts out. At this rate they will finish the whole novel in the first season. What in hell are they going to do for a second season then? They could have had at least three seasons out of that door stop of a book without trying. Five if they didn't shorten anything.
And yeah, Sulphur, it was unfortunately absolutely possible today. That's what's so bleak about it. They never shy away from showing us our worst nature. Fifteen Million Merits doesn't even seem that impossible in the not so distant future. I often came away feeling both awed by the observational skill and disheartened by my recognition of how little of a stretch it would be for some of the worst ones to come true. A few more hopeful endings would help. I like to believe we can achieve something shy of dystopia even if I have to lie a bit to myself to do it. The unblinking view of us is hard to take on a binge watch.
I'll be checking out some of these other mentions. Thanks.
Gray on 27/5/2020 at 21:49
Quote Posted by Tocky
"The Last Kingdom"
Curiously, you're the third person whose opinion I trust to recommend this, so I'll have to put it on my to-do list now. I'll let you know what my findings are later.