Maniac tells the story of a group of people involved in a bizarre clinical trail.We focus mainly on two subjects and two of the doctors conducting the study. And a slightly insane Artificial Intelligence. Maniac is the kind of show that would have never been made just a few years ago. It’s chock full of special effects, all of them flawless in their execution, and has a story that is a story in the loosest sense of the word. From the very start we are never sure of that these people live in the real world. There are none of…
Category: tv review
Lost In Space
Most people remember Lost In Space, if they remember it at all, as a very silly show filled with talking carrots, cyclops, and sexy floating green women. It didn’t start out that way, the first couple of episodes were pretty serious with a lot of Cold War tensions as Dr Smith is clearly an Agent for the Bad Guys. They fairly quickly dropped the Super Villain aspect of Dr Smith since this was a story that had no where to go. Either they killed Smith or they turned him into something less threatening. They chose the latter. He went from…
Netflix’s Mute
Mute is a Science Fiction show that has no reason for being a Science Fiction show. It’s a simple revenge story. The kind that Charles Bronson made in the 1970s and Liam Neeson still makes today. But for some unknown reason, the story is set in some Sci Fi future with flying cars and giant billboards. A sci fi setting does not make a sci fi story, for that, you need some element of the story that has to do with, you know, science. Blade Runner is Science Fiction because it is about cyborgs, a futuristic bit of technology. If…
Altered Carbon
I read Altered Carbon when it first came out. I loved the idea and thought at the time this was one of those unfilmable stories. After all, its the tale of people who hop from body to body the way we change clothes. What actor would want to sign up for a role that would last one or two episodes? What audience could keep track of who was who? Then there was the overarching story with its multiple worlds, its super advanced tech, and its complex morality that no longer looks like morality at all. Netflix solves most of the…
Star Trek Discovery Season 1 Thoughts
The only thing that can happen to make this series make any sense at all is if they reveal the fact that it takes place in yet another parallel universe, and not the one known to fans of Star Trek. The Continuity Errors are through the roof, even if the constant addition of little nods in every episode to some past incarnation of Star Trek. The tech is too advanced, the unifroms are too different, and the Klingons-well, they just aren’t Klingons as we know them, Jim. Each Star Trek series has veered a little farther from the fun, heroic,…
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is fun and wacky and not exactly like those fun and wacky movies of the 50s and 60s that it tries so hard to copy. There’s a lot of swearing and a bit of nudity. There’s also the whole marriage breakup and the over the top Jewishness of most of the characters. Not something you saw a lot of in Doris Day and Cary Grant movies. Then there’s a woman transvestite who may or may not be homosexual. All we know for sure is she likes wearing men’s clothes. The bulk of the story revolves…
Star Trek Discovery
Spoilers for the first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery. If The Orville leans a little to the silly side, Discovery leans a little too much to the dark side. In the first two episodes, we met a Captain, crew, ship, and villain that will soon be dust in the wind. Just as well, they all had names that were impossible to pronounce anyway. On the whole, Star Trek Discovery is better than Enterprise, which is not too high a bar to jump. The show and its theme song hit a lot of familiar notes and bring up a lot…
The Orville: First Impressions
Seth MacFarlane is the creative genius behind Family Guy. My favorite episodes on that show are the ones that see Stewie, voiced my Seth, and Brian the dog, also voiced by Seth, using a time travel device. These are funny, serious, and often a bit profound episodes. This is the bar I was expecting The Orville to hop over. I didn’t expect The Orville to be Star Trek, which is kind of what the ads wanted me to expect. The Orville is neither as funny as Family Guy nor as serious as Star Trek The Next Generation. The first episode…
Colony
In 1992 there was a silly little movie called The Gun in Betty Lou’s Handbag. It was a bit of fluff about a librarian that gets into trouble. Somewhere near the end there is a scene of the bad guy having dinner with a man and his wife. He offers the wife a bit of food on the end of a knife. She take the food into her mouth nervously-and then the bad guy scrapes the blade across her teeth and slices through her cheek. This was one of the most shocking bits of violence I have ever seen in…
Travelers
Kind of Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets The Terminator. We start off by watching someone die as a clock counts down their death. They fall down and die, only to come back to life as the clock starts counting up again. As in the brillant and far too short lived Brain Dead, the aliens who take over the bodies continue to pretend they are the bodies they are wearing. Our Cell is made up of five Travelers from the future who, like Kyle Reese, want to save the future. They have cool future tech and of course know things…