Topic: The TV Show Thread

@Jimmer-jammer no arguments there, the Justice League movie that was actually released is about as an injustice as could’ve been done to DC’s illustrious legacy.

@zupertramp same here, I loved man of steel. I thought it was absolutely wicked barring the dumb scene of Kevin Costner and a tornado. I was disappointed by BVS until Wonder Woman tipped up. Funny how I love wonder woman in the Zack Snyder film but found her solo movie to be painfully average (good just not amazing). The extended cut of BVS is marginally better.

I love Watchmen and the dawn of the dead remake so I am a fan of Zak Snyder I guess. I wonder if his films would be even better if someone was there to tell him when something comes across as dumb. Not like JL level interference, just a cut and trim there so a viewer doesn't go away thinking about the couple silly scenes that overshadow what is largely a good movie

@ralphdibny Snyder is doing a new zombie flick, Army of the Dead, out on Netflix this summer.

@JohnnyShoulder nice! Could be good, even from that short trailer it looks like it will be lampooning another folly of humankind which is one of the main things that Romero's Dead films do

I finished the first season of The Great there, brilliant show. It’s pretty similar to The Favourite in tone, as it’s from the same strange mind. Not very historical but really funny and a total farce from start to end. The final part of the Deutschland trilogy is also out in English now so I’m binging that.

@Jecht_Ultima Yeah, Deutschland 86 and Deutschland 89 are the other seasons and it’s all on All4 now. Really enjoying the last season so far!

@ralphdibny oh and sorry I'm just getting back to this but no i wasn't aware of any all encompassing tv crossover theory. Sounds interesting. I'll have to look that up.

@zupertramp no worries 👍, I'm in and out sometimes myself and I like to make time to reply to people properly so I just browse the site and save the replies for later when I have time! I just looked it up, it's called something like the Tommy westphall shared TV universe or something

Decided to subscribe to Disney+. It looks like they're starting to build up enough stuff I'm interested in that it should be worth it.

I just watched s2e8 of Clone Wars @RogerRoger ! I must admit I cracked a smile at what I assumed to be Anakin's first Force choke, performed on that Poggle dude to get him to reveal how to kill the zombie worm parasites!

@RogerRoger it's certainly getting better as it goes. Still not coming anywhere close to the Mandalorian for me though, that show seemed perfect, at least in terms of my own sensibilities.

I caught a bit of it again today because my parents were watching the episode with Ahsoka. I am sure you are aware of how Westerns were heavily influenced by Japanese Samurai movies and vice versa and that episode perfectly captures the link between the two genres. It's almost like a crossover between a samurai movie and a western and it shows how similar the conventions of both types of movie are.

Edit: I just watched the first couple of Mandalore related episodes of Clone Wars and they were really good. I think mainly because they show a personal side to Obi Wan, something more than his usual stoicism. It is a great choice to show us his past love. Also Anakin was such a legend in this episode because of how he killed that Tal Merrick guy and just laughed it off after. I thought Obi Wan was going to do it but then I thought Anakin might pop up and he did. And Obi wan is just shakes his head "Oh Anakin..." 😂. I don't know why I find their blasé approach to this sort of thing so funny. I also liked the philosophical deconstruction of the two sides of the argument, violent peace keeping versus pacifist neutrality. Generally the show has been "going there" on these sorts of debates which I've enjoyed, particularly the moral implication of a genetically engineered clone army that was thoroughly explored in the earlier episode "Deserter".

@RogerRoger Anakin is definitely such a boss in this series, I can see why your friend rates clone wars Anakin highly as a different character to the film Anakin! (I think you said something like that anyway, it was a while ago!)

I couldn't quite work out if/when Obi wan finds out about the marriage. I don't think he was at the wedding in attack of the clones and it's been a few years since I've watched revenge of the sith.

I hate palpatine so much haha, it's way harder to watch his deceit over this many episodes than it is to watch in three 2-ish hour movies.

I know you've mentioned about how you love the utopian purity of the Federation in Star Trek, I am curious to know if there's something like that in Star Wars that you also like. There's nothing so obviously similar to me in Star Wars, the Jedi council as early as the phantom menace has been depicted as a bunch of hypocritical plums and we all know how the galactic senate ends up. The original trilogy Jedi fare better in their representation because they are legitimate underdogs and the politics is stripped away in favour of a good vs. evil battle. The sequel trilogy obviously combines a bit of both where even Luke is jaded about the implications of an organised Jedi movement - I know this was an unpopular depiction of Luke but I really enjoyed it.

@RogerRoger haha Papa Palps, that is a grim evocation for some reason 😅. I didn't mean it so much in like I hate the character, it's more that I hate his character which means he is an effective villain. It's so often that we are guided to root for villains these days, even Vader. But Palpatine is bad to the bone!

Fair enough, thanks for answering and explaining more. The comparison between Trek and Wars is frequently made, or at least was in the old days. I think it's a silly comparison in terms of the content of both franchises because apart from having space ships they are incredibly different. I guess the fandom can be compared and contrasted but even then, I've always thought of Star Wars as the popular accessible franchise. I know many people who like Star Wars and very few who like Trek and normally the Trek fans still like Star Wars at least a bit.

I know I prefer Trek but Star Wars is a lot easier to get into for an average audience because on a surface level it's only 9 films.... Well 6 films when I formed this opinion 😅 and now that I think about it, there's actually 12 films including Clone Wars, Rogue One and Solo.

I guess I always drew the parallel of the original trilogy to World War 2 and the prequel trilogy is more representative of the by then highly publicised murky nature of US politics from WW2 onwards. I draw a parallel of the sequel trilogy to a money hungry cash grab....haha just kidding.

I had something else to say but I forget what it is now 🤦‍♂️, I'll say it next time if I remember!

@RogerRoger haha you what? Palpatine did nothing wrong! Even if his ideology was agreeable, the way he goes about getting there is off the scale of wrongness. You can't force and coerce people into compliance through fear and guilt. Even a legitimate utopia would never work if you have to trample the egos of the disenfranchised to get there. There has to be a choice, you can embrace and educate but to force people into it is the wrong way to go about it. The benefit of some people is not the benefit of everybody and if you brush people aside, ostracise and even kill those who oppose you then your utopia is nothing but a farce. It might take longer to get where you want to be and you may find your perfect society isn't even quite the same as you originally wanted it to be but at least it is legitimate and you never sacrifice your ideals to get there. That's just my opinion but now I realise that I don't even know what Palpatine's main goal was lol, I thought he just wanted to be in charge of everyone and live forever. I am going to seek out this rabbit hole you have avoided and educate myself..... _{Palpatine Forever!}

McDiarmid is certainly a great actor and he is also one of the great bits of movie trivia because he played an older Palpatine in Return of the Jedi as a young man and then was old enough to play a younger Palpatine in the Phantom Menace. I don't really know much of what else he has been in though, I always assumed he was more of a stage actor than a film and TV actor. He's probably a better actor than the mask with a chimps eyes they used for Empire Strikes Back! Whatever happened to movie trivia? Now it's just standard conversation and there is an overload of information for every new release that there aren't any small informative tidbits that could be considered "trivia".

I've never thought of the two franchises comparatively from those perspectives actually. That's quite interesting to consider Star Wars a historical record and Trek to be an ideological manifesto. I've always been fascinated by what is now the "Legends" expanded universe even though I haven't delved much into it apart from playing a few games in the past. There has been times in the past where I have gone on a wiki-binge and read things that detail as far back as the start of recorded history in the Star Wars universe though I forget now what I've learned now!

I think I was quite interested in the construction of the hyper space lanes from star wars. I just thought it's more likely that we will end up with Trek's warp drive as there has been some scientific theory as to how it could be achieved, even if it uses yet to be discovered matter. What I have read about it though has indicated that there would be a particulate build up on the edge of the warp bubble that would explode or something on arrival at the destination and well, destroy the destination lol. Maybe there will be some combination of both the Wars and Trek technologies with safe entry and exit points for craft travelling in this warp bubble. That's if our species survives to that point, somehow I doubt we will. But you never know, one of our evolutionary descendants might get there in the end!

Edit: some short thoughts on the last few episodes I've watched....

Detective Divo - lol
Senator Stonks - also lol and there are memes to go with it 😂
Admiral Trench - were you ok with this character? He is sufficiently cartoony to not resemble his inspiration
S2E17 - haven't watched this yet but the episode opens "in memory of Akira Kurosawa" who directed some of the more well known Samurai films I was talking about earlier in relation to the Mandalorian. He died in 1998 so I'm guessing the subject of the episode is influenced by him in some way, unless the episode came out on a ten year anniversary of his death or something (edit 2: yep it was inspired by The Seven Samurai and by extension the western remake The Magnificent Seven! It's the same story as one of the early Mandolorian episodes too)
Doge Urus - the memes just write themselves!

@ralphdibny Ian McDiarmid doesn't pop up much in film or TV, but he was in the second series of that mad Channel 4 show Utopia a few years back. Worth a look, especially since it's weirdly relevant all of a sudden

@Gremio108 Love that show. Not too sure on the American version on Prime. It's still good TV but there is something missing from it.

@Gremio108 never seen it but just looked it up. Certainly looks quite interesting! The wiki mentions BSE epidemic being one of the predicted events come true before the start of the show. I remember that and it's odd to think how different it is to today. I mainly remember my mum always asking "Has that got beef in it?" every time we would eat out or at somebody's house. I also remember suddenly not being able to eat curly wurlys because they had gelatin in them 😭😂

@RogerRoger haha I think I only notice the names because I watch stuff with the subtitles on. I normally watch late at night so I have to have the speakers on a lower volume. I can still hear the dialogue, sound effects and music but it saves me having to rewind if there's a bit of dialogue that's just a bit too quiet. Sucks when they are on Kamino though because you can't read the white subtitles against the white backdrops of their building interiors haha.

That Divo guy just made me laugh though, I wouldn't say he was particularly meme worthy. Doge Urus is a sebulba type character, I think they are called Dugs and Doge is the title of their leader - I could only find one meme for him. I only really heard of the Stonks meme in the last year or so, my meme knowledge is vastly outdated, like early noughties outdated but yeah, there are quite a few Senator Stonks memes that combine the character with the well known (but not to me lol) meme!

I haven't read any of the books or anything, I've only played like Dark Forces 1&2 (not all the way through) and some of the GameCube games and obviously EP 1: Racer which we discussed before. I've dipped into the film to game adaptations too but not for very long, normally it was like having a go at a friend's house or something. I think when I was like 14/15/16 years old, I had a Saturday job at a repair shop. I was the only one there and I just took stuff in for repair and gave stuff back to customers, but yeah it wasn't very busy so I'd spend most of the days on Wikipedia reading random fictional histories. I learned a lot about Marvel comics in that time too, weirdly due to nature of retcons in comics, most of that info was outdated not too long after!

Oh yeah I forgot about the spider episode in Mando! I remember thinking of you when I saw that episode, I hope it didn't spoil it for you!

I just looked up the Ion Engine, both the real and fictional ones. They look largely similar and the star wars one is used for sublight travel as well anyway. I don't think I'd exactly say I think us harnessing faster than light travel is likely. Especially as we haven't discovered anything that would allow the currently theorised methods. I just find the prospect exciting even if the real world probability is slightly deflating. We need alien contact soon though lol, it would definitely either solve or distract us from the world's problems. A negative first contact would remind us all what we are striving for and I think show us what really matters and what perceptions it might be easier for us to let go of. I'd hope a positive first contact would do the same from showing us an example and hopefully giving us the technology to move forward instead of miring in the status quo with the drip feed of technological advancements designed to liberate us of our money over time. Stagnation gives humanity too much time to think which is good to an extent but I perhaps think that we are overthinking things now which in my experience is never a healthy thing to do.

@JohnnyShoulder @ralphdibny I've not seen it for years but it was on my mind because I was talking about it with a friend the other day. I've never seen the American version, in fact I forgot all about that.

Remember those gelatin snakes that came in a little plastic packet, backed with cardboard? If you believed the kids round my neck of the woods, those things were practically a guaranteed BSE parcel.

@Gremio108 Me and my mate at work were kinda obsessed with Utopia and would have a weekly discussion about what happened that week and our theories about what will happen in future episodes.

I've started watching Arrested Development this week and I just wanna say that it's really damn funny! I've heard that you should drop off at season 4 and 5 because there's a drop in quality but idk