What Are You Watching?

[Danster]

I watched the first episode of the new Loki series yesterday. It was a good season opener.

[General Ceel]

I watched the first episode of the new Loki series yesterday. It was a good season opener.

I'm enjoying Loki season 2 as well. I hope that when they're all done with Loki as a series they bring him back into the movies as a hero who has grown as a person during his time traveling the multiverse. Perhaps nobody believes he's changed and he still has to prove it...

[General Ceel]

Rewatching the MCU movies. God, Captain America: Civil War is still so bad...

[Danster]

Rewatching the MCU movies. God, Captain America: Civil War is still so bad...

Haha, yep! Though I have a bit of a personal connection to it. My missus was pregnant, past her due date, with our third. We'd just dropped the older two off at the in-laws as my missus had an inkling something might be happening, so we got home and started watching Civil War because it happened to be on the TV at the time. Now, our first two were induced, so our experience was to head to the hospital at the time they told us to get there and let them start things off. However, third time round it looks like happening naturally and my wife didn't necessarily know what to expect. She'd been complaining of twinges for a couple of hours, but it got to just after 9pm and she said, "I think we ought to head in". I got her in the car and drove to the hospital for about 9:30, had to get her in a wheelchair to get her from the car park to the maternity ward, where we dumped our stuff in a room and she got into a birthing pool. Two minutes past ten and our third was born, literally less than an hour after being sat at home watch Captain America: Civil War!

The second and third episodes of Loki were ok, but they're very confusing!

[General Ceel]

I'll admit that Loki can be confusing... but I'd rather be confused and need to rewatch something to understand it than to watch something so overly simple that there is nothing else to gain from it.

[Danster]

That's a fair point. I did enjoyed Loki. It will be interesting to see where they go with it, particularly with Majors and his arrest for domestic violence. To be honest, I found his portrayal of Kang and Victor Timely pretty irritating.

I love your idea about feeding him back into the MCU movies as a changed man, there could be some humourous side plots as he grows more frustrated that no one believes in his new found benevolence.

[General Ceel]

Its looking more and more like they are moving away from Kang. I think that's a mistake, regardless of Major's status. He's a character with variants. You could easily recast him. Aside from that, I think they were in the process of doing things "right" this time around, even if the critical public couldn't see it. Everybody loved how the Thanos stuff turned out, but people forget that it was set up almost completely off screen or in mid/end credit clips. With Kang we were getting a ton of screen time. Even if you didn't like the variants we'd seen so far, you were always going to get many more, perhaps increasingly more interesting, frightening and competent ones. Its almost better that you didn't find yourself loving the first few variants. You have to build up to something. While people thought that the most recent "phases" of the MCU seemed disjointed, I still believe there was a plan and that it was all going to make sense by the end. I suspect that a number of the shows and movies were not even in the main universe at all.

[Danster]

Thinking back on Loki, I think I would have preferred a series where Loki, Mobius and Sylvie had to visit lots of different eras and locations to track down different Kang variants, more of a rip-roaring rollercoaster ride of a series with a different setting for each episode. I understand them going for something a little more high brow, but I'd have preferred a sit back and enjoy the ride sort of experience, with the interaction between the three giving some great comedic moments.

Me and my son have just reached the penultimate episode of Mandalorian Season 2, so we're not far from THAT episode; I'm looking forward to seeing his reaction.

I'd forgotten so much from it as well. For example, I had completely forgotten that we saw Morgan Elspeth in season 2 and that the Ahsoka episode basically laid the groundwork for the plot for her standalone series (trying to get the location of Thrawn).

[General Ceel]

"Thinking back on Loki, I think I would have preferred a series where Loki, Mobius and Sylvie had to visit lots of different eras and locations to track down different Kang variants, more of a rip-roaring rollercoaster ride of a series with a different setting for each episode. I understand them going for something a little more high brow, but I'd have preferred a sit back and enjoy the ride sort of experience, with the interaction between the three giving some great comedic moments."

The "trouble" I'm having with every Disney series so far is that in the streaming era all the shows exist in some strange, not fully developed, place between traditional TV series, mini-series and theatrical movie. Its like they don't quite know what they want to be, and the end results suffer because of it.

We get a limited number of episodes of varying length with near-movie theater level production. More long winded than theatrical movies, but less detailed than a TV series that once upon a time might have meandered a bit, but still gave you dozens of episodes per season with more time spent exploring the characters and their story. They've now trimmed away all of the "fat," but also sacrificed all the exploration. As a result I find it hard to get truly invested in these shows. I sort of enjoy them while they're happening, but I don't find myself dwelling on anything that happens or anybody I meet after the shows end. Contrast that with my favorite shows from traditional TV over the decades... with some of those shows, I find my imagination still living in those worlds when I think about them, even years after the fact.

I guess what I'm getting at is that this is a problem. I'm not asking them to abandon what they're doing in favor of going full-movie or full-classic TV format. But they'd better hurry up and evolve what they're trying to do right now. They're spending way too much money to create so much half-baked material. For better or worse, I think that in decades to come we'll look back at this era of streaming shows as being primitive, formative years that are important to the process, but ultimately don't live up to the better things to come. This is the silent movie era, or the black and white era, replete with a few diamonds and a lot of rough.

[General Ceel]

Vijayanagara - The Last Emperors of South India
https://youtu.be/nlMpxUYKTcU?si=IIeZhPyOfNCmVLUT