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April 11, 2016 by Belghast

Fear Season 2

Something you need to know about me, is that I love Walking Dead. I started watching it during the first six episode season and have been a fan since. Over time it developed into a sort of watercooler moment for me and my coworkers, where we watch it every Sunday night and discuss it the next morning at work. This is the first time in my life that I have really had a show that I wanted to talk about like this, and even more so had people I wanted to talk about it with. So naturally when Fear the Walking Dead was announce we were pumped, because it would be our methadone to help weather the long dry spells between episodes of the main franchise. That said… season one was a massive disappointment, for me at least. It centered around a cast of characters that I simply struggled to relate to. I spent most of the first season rooting for them to get eaten by zombies, and now that we enter the second season I had hopes that maybe just maybe they would finally turn into characters worthy of the franchise. As it stands the only characters that I can honestly say I like… are Daniel Salazar and Victor Strand… the characters that the show runners are very much setting up to be the “bad guys”.

The biggest problem I have with the show right now is that the characters seem so phenomenally dumb. Admittedly the world has just fallen, and they are not quite adjusted to it… however they should have spent enough time by now to realize that the dead are dangerous. They should also know however that humans are even more dangerous. It just feels like they have exited the first season with zero lessons learned. It is like they still keep expecting life to return to normal… even as they are heading out to sea with Los Angeles burning in the background. I don’t want to get into any spoilers, but honestly that is pretty easy so far because nothing of any importance has really happened yet. Right now I am still very much rooting for the zombies because I keep thinking if we can thin the herd of our cast a little bit… maybe just maybe they will start to take the threat seriously. I guess the problem that I am having is that I keep expecting this to be Walking Dead, when at its core it just isn’t. I will probably give the show a few more episodes, because until Game of Thrones starts up in a few weeks I don’t have a Sunday evening show to be watching… and I have gotten into the habit of watching something on Sunday nights. That said… so far the second season is off to a pretty boring start.

Daredevil Season 2

As disappointed as I am in Fear… if there was a polar opposite I would feel that about Daredevil season two. While the season did not have the strong single story arc that the first one did, it chopped up into what felt like three smaller separate story arcs that were equally enjoyable. This is really the season where we see Daredevil emerge to be the hero we recognize from the comics. Its like over the course of season one and the first half of season two… the pieces were falling into place one by one. I guess that is part of what I have loved so much is that you can see the progression from a vigilante wearing essentially black sweatpants to the badass hero that we have come to expect. There are going to be spoilers in this write up because I am not sure how to talk about it without really going into spoilers. The quintessential moment for me was the creation of his “cane” weapon. From that point on this show turned into exactly what I always hoped it would be and I was constantly getting rewarded with awesome shots of him throwing it into baddies and then retracting it just in time to hit someone else with it. While he has better armor in this show… I like that it still shows the personal toll that being a hero has on not only his body but his relationship with Karen and Foggy.

The highlight of the season however has to be the introduction of the Punisher. “Shane” was a character that I loved to hate in The Walking Dead, and when that character left the show there was a big hole that never quite got filled… that is until Rick himself started to fill that role. Jon Bernthal makes a phenomenal Punisher, and I hope beyond hope that eventually we will see his own spin off series. As a kid my favorite comic book character was The Punisher, and my friends was Daredevil… so it was always an extremely special moment whenever we got to read comics where the two characters interacted and teamed up to fight the Kingpin. I have this feeling that we are heading in that direction, because in this season the Kingpin also finally became the Kingpin that we love to hate. As far as the Elektra arc I have to say it was done pretty well, and the whole hand vs chaste concept. The season was essentially a condensed version of all of the story lines that I can remember relating to Elektra/Daredevil/Stick/The Hand. Unfortunately the whole “Black Sky” concept is not something that I remember from the comics, because in that version The Hand worship a demon called the Beast. So this appears to be the point where we leave the story line and go off in a different direction. Regardless I am sure we will see Elektra once again, and I am certainly hoping that Season 3 will show us more of the Punisher and Daredevil team up as well.

Streaming Goodness

February 4, 2016 by Belghast

RWBY

Rooster Teeth is one of those groups that I have known has existed forever… but never really watched much of. I was not a Halo player, but I do admit to watching quite a bit of the first few seasons of Red vs Blue. Similarly RWBY is one of those products that I have known was available, but for whatever reason never actually watched. There was a certain bit of fitting tribute the other day that I started watching the show, on the Anniversary of its creator Monty Oum’s death. Over the course of several hours of watching I went from knowing absolutely nothing about this show, to becoming a huge fan. I had always heard it described as “An American Anime” but didn’t really know what to expect from that. I mean Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra are pretty much what I think of when I think of American Anime. I love both of those shows and a lot of other continuous narrative cartoons like Steven Universe, Adventure Time, and Bravest Warriors. So as to why I never started this one in particular, is as big of a guess as any.

I guess what I like about it so much right now is that it has pretty much everything I loved about Bleach, without all of the stuff I didn’t love about it. What attracted me to Bleach was this premise that created a universe full of really interesting characters. Sure while Ichigo is the “main character” there are a bunch of other extremely interesting good guys and bad guys that make up the tapestry. RWBY does this through the creation of teams that fight together, and can either be positive or negative influences on the story setting. Also there are shades of post apocalyptic, in that the characters exist in this world that is being plagued by a bunch of supernatural creatures known as the Grimm. The only way mankind has managed to survive is by harnessing the power of dust, refined elemental essence to power up their abilities and be able to fight back. The show itself takes place in a sort of Hogwarts for demon hunters, a school known as Beacon that trains individuals to become either Huntsmen or Huntresses. So all of those elements like Bleach and Naruto are there, to keep churning out interesting people to encounter in the world.

What makes the show better for me… is the fact that thus far at least over the course of the three seasons I chain watched… there isn’t a lot of repetition. The frustration with Bleach is when you have the realization that every single season is the same. Ichigo gets his ass kicked by some new bad guy > Ichigo trains to unlock some previously undiscovered ability > Ichigo wins… but just barely… but still enough to save his friends. While RWBY borrows heavily from Anime tropes, the way it puts things together feels more fresh to me… because it is based in a culture I already understand. The problem with Anime in general is that there are so many cultural experiences that I lack, and I simply cannot understand without having to research why the hell “this thing” was funny or important. When I watch most Anime, there are certain points where I feel I need footnotes to understand the subtle nuance of what is happening. RWBY however makes sense out of the box, with nothing lost in translation… because it quite truly IS “American Anime”. So I have to say… I am now hooked and will join the folks waiting every week for the next show to release. I’ve even gone so far as to hook others on the show, which I guess is the truest sign of enjoyment.

Heroes Reborn

When I am sick I seem to ratchet down my game playing and increase my television watching. So over the last few days I have been hunting for things to watch, and over the last two nights have picked back up on Heroes Reborn. I started the first episode of the show some time ago, but it either failed to grab me… or I got distracted. I’ve now chain watched my way through the entire first season and I have to say… I really enjoyed it. Heroes is one of those shows that I have both extremely fond and extremely negative memories of. The first season was among the best single television seasons I have seen… and then that second season…. I would probably rank among the worst. The third season came along and fixed some of the problems with season two… but by that time the audience was gone and the show was doomed. I don’t think I actually watched any of that fourth season… which honestly after watching Heroes Reborn, makes me want to go back and chain through the originals again.

Reborn is the perfect example of a show that stands on the shoulders of the original, but doesn’t actually require you to have watched any of it. Sure there are plot points that you will get earlier if you know who certain characters are from the original, but you learn soon enough what powers they have. The entire show takes place in a very “Days of Future Past” storyline, where the heroes… now called Evos are being forced to register their powers. There is very much a “humans” vs “evos” undercurrent that runs through the show, along with the expected “no evos allowed” signs. What makes this season work however is the same thing that makes me question if they are setting themselves up for a crappy second season again. Much like the “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World” plot of the first season of the original, there is a clear narrative path that ends up being concluded in a massive event. The problem is… I am not really sure how they top this. I mean you can only quite literally save all of humanity so many times during a television show. All of this said… I really enjoyed myself and I guess I am along for the ride when the second season releases.

Media Consumption 11/28/2015

November 28, 2015 by Belghast

Rainy Morning

It’s been a good morning, albeit a cold and rainy one. I got up and made a beeline to the kitchen to fix some breakfast. We’ve recently had a renaissance with the little triangle sandwich maker thing that became popular during the 90s. Recently we started playing with making pancakes in it, and the resulting tiny triangles of pancake goodness are awesome. So I fixed pancakes and sausage and my wife and I nommed happily. From there I ended up popping into World of Warcraft for a bit to do some garrison stuff, and shortly thereafter found The Goonies on cable. Around about this point my wife and I decided it was a good idea to go lay down and snuggle with the cats. It was around this point where my wife asked me… if I had already done a blog post. It had quite honestly slipped my mind. I live my life based on a sequence of rituals, with each one kicking off the next ritual… and if any of them happen out of order all sorts of mayhem occurs.

So that folks is how one almost breaks a three year streak of daily posting… not with tragic circumstances… but just a charming morning that made me forget that the internet was a thing. As a result I am getting a really late start at the day, but have now officially had some coffee so I believe I can functional properly once more. I’m back on the sofa wrapped in my blanket cocoon and tapping away on my laptop. Generally speaking Thanksgiving is usually this difficult holiday filled with running around like crazy, but this year a bunch of things have happened ending up making it the most chill and relaxed time ever. Firstly we wrapped up the work on the house just before the extended weekend, and with that there was a flurry of cleaning to make the house feel “finished”. Then we were able to load all of our meals into an evening and a morning… giving us the rest of the break just to chill. At this point we are taking advantage of the constant rain and the cold temperatures to simply stay in doors and hibernate.

Jessica Jones

With the hibernation has come a lot of Netflix or equivalent digital streaming. Over the past week I have been watching the new Marvel Netflix series, Jessica Jones. I have to admit that this is a character that I only know of in relation to the other characters she surrounds. I went through my “Kung Fu” phase where I read a lot of Powerman and Iron Fist, and ever since have had a certain affinity for the characters in that chunk of the Marvel Universe. In truth… after the amazing results of the Daredevil series, I would have watched anything produced for Netflix feature Marvel characters. Jessica Jones however took a completely different tone, but one equally gritty. While Daredevil shows the clear physical toll of being a hero… Jessica Jones does a good job of showing the mental and emotional toll. Jones herself is completely walled off from the world in her own emotional bomb shelter, trying to keep as many people away from her… because she is convinced that is the only way she can actually keep them safe.

The show also digs into a lot of themes of violation and betrayal but does so in a slightly different way than we are used to seeing. The Purple Man has always been such a strange character in the comics, and I was not quite sure how they would end up making it work for the screen. David Tennant’s portrayal does this excellent job of walking this razor line between making him completely horrific and likable at the same time. There are times you think that maybe with the proper role model, he could change and be a force for good… only to get those hopes dashed when you realize that this is a person without any sense of a moral compass. The actor playing Luke Cage also does an amazing job of bringing that character to life, and I am hoping we see a significant big more of him in the future seasons and the supposed upcoming Luke Cage Hero for Hire show. My favorite insider moment in the show was when Rosario Dawson’s Clare Temple, and it is setting her up to be the Night Nurse taking care of all the supers in trouble. I could gush about Ritter, but really without her the show would have fallen apart completely. I highly suggest watching it… and I am trying really hard not to do any serious spoilers here.

Inside Out

Last night I also finally got around to watching Pixar’s Inside Out. I have to say that in all honesty there has yet to be a Pixar film that I have not loved, and that is saying something because in truth… I can’t say the same about Disney animated films in general. There is a certain magic that Pixar brings to the screen, and a certain timeless “realness” that they give their characters. This film was a bit of an emotional roller coaster but I guess that makes since as it is kinda the “Feelings Have Feelings Too” movie. There were so many moments where I laughed out loud, and several moments towards the end of the movie where I failed miserably to fight back tears. Maybe the whole nostalgic binge I have been on served to deepen the experience of this movie. There were so many profound messages like… you can’t really be happy without also feeling sad sometimes. There were moments I related to the dad, especially when he was straight up oblivious… because so often I get lost in my own head and forget that I am supposed to be paying attention to the world around me. One of my favorite bits came at the very end of the movie when it showed the inside of the cats head… I am pretty sure that is exactly how it works inside our cats at least. This morning while laying in bed… every so often one of them would go tearing through the house for no apparent reason… only to come back and snuggle a few minutes later.

Heroes Reborn

Another thing that I started last night was Heroes Reborn, which is the reboot of the much acclaimed Heroes television show from a few years back. I say much acclaimed… and by that I guess I really just mean the first season. The show as a whole went tragically downhill quickly after that, and I blame the writers strike on pretty much killing all hope of that show living up to its full potential. I mean I realize strikes have to happen, but that managed to kill a number of would be amazing televisions shows. This time around we have zoomed forward to several years after the events of the first series, to a time where the “Evos” as they are now calling folks with super powers are out in the open and an act of terrorism has turned the public against them. The show has shades of the Mutant Registration act from X-Men, and the first episode centers on the dad from the first series, who has apparently forgotten any knowledge from the event. The first episode was intriguing enough to get me to start watching it, and I figure at some point today I will continue on that process. Will be interesting to see where they go with this one, and I hope that maybe just maybe they can live up to the promise that the first season started.

Media Consumption 10/24/2015

October 24, 2015 by Belghast

Week of Star Wars

This week was extremely dominated by my burgeoning love of Star Wars. I have written many times about how I just was not feeling the franchise after the prequels… and that all of the hype surrounding me has rekindled that little kid inside of me that wanted to be “darfa bader”. I’ve always loved the empire more than the rebels, and I feel kinda bad about that… but Storm Troopers and Darth Vader…. come on. I was sick for a chunk of the week and while home sick… I caught up on a few things… namely Star Wars Rebels. So without further rambling… lets talk about stuff.

Star Wars: Force Awakens – Trailer 3

This trailer is absolutely amazing and only serves to bump my hype for this movie up to a fever pitch. This honestly scares me more than a little bit. I am as excited right now for Force Awakens as I was for Phantom Menace… and we all know how that turned out. I think the thing that gives me confidence more than anything is the giant trail of money attached to this movie. Disney paid four billion dollars to purchase the Star Wars franchise… and I think the realize if this movie is the stinker than Phantom Menace was… they have essentially flushed the vast majority of that money down the toilet. That said I have also come to realize that quite simply I don’t think George Lucas knows how to direct human beings with human emotions. I’ve recently watched the prequels again… and those movies are full of some really damned good actors… all of which are chewing up scenery with some of the most unnatural dialog and acting I have seen. You take those same actors and put them in quite literally any other movie and they do amazing jobs… so it has the be the movies themselves that are the problem. Anyways… enough of that and on to the trailer.

I love the feel of this trailer, how it is a sequence of more fleshed out vignettes this time. I have gone back and forth on the popular conspiracies and at this point I simply don’t have a clue. I don’t know why Luke Skywalker isn’t on the movie poster, and I am starting to question if it is him with the robotic hand reaching out to R2-D2. I am playing this game of “who is the Skywalker”, and I right now I am starting to think that maybe Rey, Finn and Kylo Ren are all connected to the previous trilogy. I am still leaning heavily towards Kylo Ren being the child of Han and Leia who has now turned to the Dark Side and become essentially a Vader fanboy… since he knows that Vader was essentially his Grandfather. You see Rey behind the seat of the Millennium Falcon in one of the shots that has come out… so that would lead you to believe that maybe she is ALSO the child of Han and Leia… maybe sibling to Kylo? Finn is the one I cannot place… since we see him wielding a lightsaber we know he is a force sensitive. Makes me wonder if maybe he is the child of Luke, but with whom. He could also be the child of Sana Solo which is now apparently the in canon wife of Han. I feel like a lot of this movie is going to center around Kylo Ren essentially going on an Artifact hunt trying to find relics of Vader, but past that I am not sure of anything. I am absolutely looking forward to December so I can finally see how the pieces are going to fit together.

Star Wars Rebels

While sick this week I caught up on watching Star Wars Rebels, which I found out you can stream from the Disney XD website so long as you have a cable provider to validate with. The only problem with this is that it isn’t really clear where one season ends and the next begins. At this point I am apparently caught up and into season two, and I have to say this show… is so great and just what we needed to bridge some gap between the prequels and the modern age movies. This show is essentially about the birth of the Rebellion as we know it episodes four through six. I’ve talked about the show in the past on my blog, and I will warn you it honestly takes a few episodes before it starts to feel right. Sabine Wren is awesome… just going to get that out there. I love Mandalorians and she has this awesome quirky nature that is just great, and I love the fact that she tags her armor every time they take down another imperial target. I also adore the paint job she did on the captured Tie Fighter.

The coolest part about this show however is the fact that we get to find out what happens to Ahsoka Tano. That was the biggest problem I had after Clone Wars you weren’t really sure what became of her. You know she isn’t in any of the prequels… largely because I don’t think the character existed until the Clone Wars cartoon… but we just know she is not around in any form. Here we find that she is fighting the good fight and acting as the rebel operative known as “Fulcrum”. It is awesome to see her again, but we know that issues are going to come up… and with a brief interaction with Darth Vader he realizes exactly who she is… and that she is still alive. You are left with the impression that she has her assumptions that Vader is Anakin… but she isn’t nearly as certain as Vader is in that interaction. I thought it was awesome that they brought in Commander Cody as well, and it makes me so damned happy that essentially Clone Wars and Rebels are a continuation of the same basic story arc. I was afraid that all of the great characters that got invented for the Clone Wars show would simply be gone, but now we are seeing them almost all revitalized as part of the Rebels show… which also I believe means they are being inducted into the canon universe. The hope is that maybe some of these characters will have brief cameos in the new movies as well.

Walking Dead Season 5 – Episode 2

Wow… this episode. I thought the first episode was intense with the quarry full of walkers, and herding them down the path. This episode starts off very benign showing you how the rest of the characters were spending the time while everyone else was out in the field with the walkers. Then in a manner so quickly that I thought it might literally be a hallucination… we see the wolves get into Alexandria and just start slaughtering the residents. We all knew the wolves would eventually get there, and it seems as though either someone jumped the fence in the same way that Carl and Enid have done… or someone left the damned gate open again. Last week we theorized as to who was hitting the car horn and leading the walkers of the pack, but this week we find out that it was instead a semi truck that was heading for one of the walls to break it down. The gun in the guard tower managed to shoot the driver… but then the driver fell on the horn while dying. The episode as a whole was just so strange to see how absolutely feral and blindingly fast the wolves were.

The part I am thankful for however is the fact that essentially this incident forced Carol to abandon her disguise. She had to become the badass we all know she is, but I do think it is significant that she once again took on the disguise of a wolf, much like she took on the disguise of a walker getting into Terminus. I think this is the sign of something more with her character… I think she got used to having to wear a mask in the years she was in her abusive marriage, and now it is just comfortable for her to keep adopting them in order to stay safe. This episode however was a tale of two styles conflicting… the monk like pacifism of Morgan, and the brutal and honest force of Carol. The body count from this episode was massive and I think in one show we have whittled down the folks in Alexandria to only the reliable and self sufficient ones are left. The wolves came in and killed all of the sheep as it were… all of the people who simply could not take care of themselves. As a result I think Alexandria is going to be a vastly different place in the coming weeks as they have to deal with this horde of walkers bearing down upon the walls. I am amped for this week to see what happens next.