What TV/Netflix show are you currently watching? (Megathread)

[bikingjahuty]

The Mandalorian: Episode 5


This unfortunately felt like another filler episode where very little that happened moved the plot forward in any meaningful way. In a show that's 20+ episodes filler episodes are par for the course, but this being only an 8 episode season, with each episode only being around half an hour is almost inexcusable. Regardless episode 5 was still pretty entertaining and was filled with a ton of prequel and OT references that I absolutely loved. This was definitely the most fan service rich episode so far. Aside from that the action was entertaining, what went down was pretty cool, and without spoiling anything the last scene has me very excited as to who might show up later on in the show. Not a bad episode, but certainly not one of the better ones so far either.


Score: 7/10

[kamikazekeeg]

The Mandalorian: Episode 5


This unfortunately felt like another filler episode where very little that happened moved the plot forward in any meaningful way. In a show that's 20+ episodes filler episodes are par for the course, but this being only an 8 episode season, with each episode only being around half an hour is almost inexcusable. Regardless episode 5 was still pretty entertaining and was filled with a ton of prequel and OT references that I absolutely loved. This was definitely the most fan service rich episode so far. Aside from that the action was entertaining, what went down was pretty cool, and without spoiling anything the last scene has me very excited as to who might show up later on in the show. Not a bad episode, but certainly not one of the better ones so far either.


Score: 7/10

I personally don't think the tease at the end is anyone we know, as I know people were getting abit worked up about that on twitter last night, but I think it's gonna just be the new character played by Giancarlo Esposito (Gus from Breaking Bad) who basically fits the tease of armor with a cape.  Not to say I wouldn't die if the tease was someone else, because it would be the best with who people thought it might be, but I'm not getting my hopes up.  At least not with Season 1 lol

[Cartagia]

Episode 5 was pretty easily my least favorite so far.  The guy playing gunslinger wasn’t very interesting, and it pretty much completely wasted Ming-Na.  Some decent fan service bits, but overall kind of weak.

I’m also expecting Giancarlo’s character to be the payoff.

[kamikazekeeg]

With my recent Star Wars kick, I've been watching Star Wars: Rebels while I do bead art.  Never watched it before, but I'm through the first season and starting into season 2 and it's not bad.  It hasn't really won me over, I think it's just alright, but it has some good moments and just the general Star Wars aspect is good.  I know some of the stuff that happens coming up, so I'm hoping things take a step up in the second season and into season 3 as there looks to be a time skip.  Definitely looking forward to some more backstory on Sabine the Mandalorian girl.  I dig her design.

[Cartagia]

Season 3 of Big Mouth is a solid continuation, but definitely feels like it is lacking the same absurdity of the first two seasons.  Still, anything to get more Jenny Slate and John Mulaney.

[kamikazekeeg]

Ended up accidentally binging the first season of Bosch over on Amazon.  Kinda heard about the show through some off the cuff remark about how the cop in the show basically bought himself a super fancy house selling the rights to one of his cases, something that makes a lot of sense if you think about it (Like what if John McClane sold the rights to the story of Die Hard 1 and got rich off that? lol) and turns out its a real solid cop drama.  I'd say it's on the side of the more realistic cop dramas, not full on The Wire where they show every bit of procedure and such, but it keeps more to that side than say...an NCIS or Bones.  The Wire connection comes back with Lance Reddick also being in this show, but in a much smaller, though slightly similar role.

I also like that it's basically focused on Bosch, the main character of the show.  A problem I found with The Wire was that there were like a dozen different stories happening at once and it felt kinda stretched thin and was probably one of the reasons I sorta fell off the show, because for every good story they would tell, there would be two others I just didn't feel interested in.  And there's 5 seasons out with a 6th on the way, so this could be something I keep up with.  I like the lead quite abit and the show is fairly well done.  I'd recommend it if you are wanting to check out a newer solid cop drama.

[bikingjahuty]

The Mandalorian: Episode 6 - 4/10


I'll first say I'm kind of pissed and fairly disappointed that half the episodes so far are pointless filler episodes that do very little to nothing at all to drive the main story forward, or contribute to the overall story arch in any meaningful way. This is starting to feel like a show that doesn't know if it wants to be a show like GoT where every episode and everything that happens is relevant to the main story in some way, or if it wants to be freakin DBZ where the majority of the episodes are pointless filler. What makes this worse is that the episodes aren't very long and there is only eight of them this season. This really irritates me, and episode 6 is exactly that, another filler episode, albeit a cool one.


I'm not going to spoil the story, but essentially the episode is about a prison break with a lot of action. It's too bad that the background story to all that action is kinda mundane, and the crew Mando must work with are by far the most cartoonish, cringy group of characters in the show so far. I thought the person they were going to break out might be of some significance in some way, but he is probably the most unremarkable character of the whole episode. On top of that, there is a "twist" towards the end that you can see coming from literally the first 5-minutes of the episode and did not surprise me at all.


As I said, the action was good and there were some genuinely tense moments, but overall this episode was completely unnecessary and does not server the main story one bit. This has been my least favorite episode thus far, and I sincerely hope with only two episodes left that this show really, really picks up because it's becoming as unremarkable as Disney's Star Wars movies.

[kamikazekeeg]

I still like these episodes, they are well done and this one had a pretty fun cast of recognizable people, but yeah, it's just another filler.  That's not the best in an already very short season.  Hopefully the last two episodes are going all out to finish up the season.

I did like the people that showed up, as I was surprised to see the dude from Sons of Anarchy, Bill Burr, and best of all, Clancy Brown, who gets to be another character in the Star Wars universe as he was also a character in Star Wars Rebels.

[Cartagia]

See, I like the fact that we are getting mostly stand alone stories with some minor tie-in to the overall arc.  It reminds of the old Tales books, or a comic run.  Not everything needs to be design as "a 8-hour movie" (or 4-5 as the case may be) that streaming services seem to have forced upon us.  The episodic structure makes more sense for a show that is releasing weekly instead of dropping for a binge session.

Speaking of binge sessions: season 4 of The Expanse came out a day early, so I watched 2 on Thursday and the remainder yesterday.  I think it was a slight step down from the previous two seasons, and roughly on par with the first.  From what I understand of the source material, this was kind of expected, as the fourth book in the series is generally considered the weakest, and mostly set-up for things to come.  It's still really, really good, and the new Amazon budget really shines with the specials effects this year.

[kamikazekeeg]

See, I like the fact that we are getting mostly stand alone stories with some minor tie-in to the overall arc.  It reminds of the old Tales books, or a comic run.  Not everything needs to be design as "a 8-hour movie" (or 4-5 as the case may be) that streaming services seem to have forced upon us.  The episodic structure makes more sense for a show that is releasing weekly instead of dropping for a binge session

That is the point though for low episode seasons.  It's meant to be a more focused, story driven, experience, without a lot of filler or dragged out story beats.  They can do a more tightly told show, while also maximizing the quality, rather than needing to stretch the budget across a lot more episodes.  I like these episodes, they are good, but when there's only 2 episodes left and nothing has progressed in the main story after 3 episodes, it doesn't feel right.

[Cartagia]

See, I like the fact that we are getting mostly stand alone stories with some minor tie-in to the overall arc.  It reminds of the old Tales books, or a comic run.  Not everything needs to be design as "a 8-hour movie" (or 4-5 as the case may be) that streaming services seem to have forced upon us.  The episodic structure makes more sense for a show that is releasing weekly instead of dropping for a binge session

That is the point though for low episode seasons.  It's meant to be a more focused, story driven, experience, without a lot of filler or dragged out story beats.  They can do a more tightly told show, while also maximizing the quality, rather than needing to stretch the budget across a lot more episodes.  I like these episodes, they are good, but when there's only 2 episodes left and nothing has progressed in the main story after 3 episodes, it doesn't feel right.

Well, it's not doing that, so one could argue that it is not what it's meant to be.  It's simply not what you expected.  Look at the first seasons of Always Sunny and Archer, a huge portion of BBC shows, all of the USA Network procedurals.  8-13 episodes a season, almost all standalone, with barely a thread to string them together - though occasionally you'd get a minor one.  You shouldn't judge a show for what you were expecting, judge it on what it actually is.

[redblaze57]

a Harlod and Kumar Christmas- I totally forgot this movie existed until I saw the blu-ray for cheap and bought it. Then I had completely forgotten that this movie came out when 3D was the biggest thing in movies. You can easily tell what were the big 3D scenes in the movie and honestly watching it in 2D... those scenes don't look the best. Overall it's a good Stoner comedy about Christmas, reuniting  with old friends, and sticking up for yourself against your father in law... even if he is Danny Trejo. Also Neil Patrick Harris' part is the best

[kamikazekeeg]

Well, it's not doing that, so one could argue that it is not what it's meant to be.  It's simply not what you expected.  Look at the first seasons of Always Sunny and Archer, a huge portion of BBC shows, all of the USA Network procedurals.  8-13 episodes a season, almost all standalone, with barely a thread to string them together - though occasionally you'd get a minor one.  You shouldn't judge a show for what you were expecting, judge it on what it actually is.

It wasn't really about expectations, it was about how they setup the show.  3 episodes dealing with the main story, and then it was 3 random episodes that do slightly delve into the Mando's backstory, but dropped the previously setup narrative entirely, and now we only have 2 episodes (hopefully both deal with it) left to get back to the main story before the season ends.  Certainly not expecting it to be wrapped up by the end, but structurally it was how they were setting up show before we got these middles episodes.

[Cartagia]

Well, it's not doing that, so one could argue that it is not what it's meant to be.  It's simply not what you expected.  Look at the first seasons of Always Sunny and Archer, a huge portion of BBC shows, all of the USA Network procedurals.  8-13 episodes a season, almost all standalone, with barely a thread to string them together - though occasionally you'd get a minor one.  You shouldn't judge a show for what you were expecting, judge it on what it actually is.

It wasn't really about expectations, it was about how they setup the show.  3 episodes dealing with the main story, and then it was 3 random episodes that do slightly delve into the Mando's backstory, but dropped the previously setup narrative entirely, and now we only have 2 episodes (hopefully both deal with it) left to get back to the main story before the season ends.  Certainly not expecting it to be wrapped up by the end, but structurally it was how they were setting up show before we got these middles episodes.

They weren't really that connected though - at least not all of them (Episode 3 definitely was).  Episode 2 is just about Mando dinking around with Jawas and repairing his ship.  The only semi-big overarcing development was The Child using the Force, and lets be honest, everyone saw that coming.  That's about the same amount of long-term development as Episode 4, where we get confirmation the FOB is still for The Child, not Mando, and that they can't stay in one place - a generally more important storytelling revelation than the Force use.  Even as a standalone Episode 6 gives us a fair amount of history on Mando - he was not always as chivalrous as we see him now - and he was definitely getting busy with the Twi'lek.

Episode 1 is debatable, since its the Pilot episode.  Yes, it is the job that sets everything in motion, but if you change the quarry at the end from The Child to literally anything else the episode remains the same, and has no long reaching effects.  It's only in those last moments that it actually becomes important to the serialized story that is being told.  Like I said before, it's Lone Wolf and Cub - just continuing adventures of this baby and surrogate father, with occasional links back to who and what they are.

It's reminding me a lot of The X-Files revival seasons.  The premiere and finale were mythology heavy (and pretty awful because of it - hopefully not the case here), and in the middle we get a bunch decent-to-good stand alone stories.

Also, I watched Unbelievable on Netflix.  It’s really good, but also very difficult to watch.

[kamikazekeeg]

Got through two more seasons of Bosch.  I really dig the show, just a solid bit of cop drama.  I think I like it, because it's generally pretty chill, like there's big drama and some action moments, but it never gets too crazy or feels unrealistic.  Just a well paced story from beginning to end and all the actors are pretty likable.  Gonna take a break from the series to focus on some other stuff.  The Expanse has a new season, Witcher is out in 3 days, and I got anime to catch up on.  Sorta ended up with a glut of things to watch lol