standard hbo shenanigans

probably have to watch season 1 again since i already forgot what happened

i literally had this convo with myself earlier and was kinda surprised by how much i didnt reallllllly want to rewatch season 1.

im sure ill gut through the hesitation and discover that i only didnt want to watch it because im still shitty over that 'finale' but still. kinda surprising considering how much i enjoyed it out the gate.

Yeah I just feel like there's a shit ton of content that I need to consume before I get back to the wolves. I just realized that season 2 of Solar Opposites is out, still have to finish Mandalorian S2, slogging through the Winter Soldier, not to mention FBoy Island.

Early 2022

feb yall

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhUTqO4Ci68

Hell yeah
Looks like Westworld is back next year as well.

so heres the thing, s2 starts airing innnn just under 3 weeks ( feb 3 ) and im excited but im also like, not in the mood to spend a week between episodes waiting for things to make sense in a meaningful way?

the season 1 finale left a super bad taste in my mouth, i find travis' heel turn to be not super compelling, and the last 2 hours of footage felt like a real shitty alien: prometheus redux around the edges.

and the funny part is, if they were airing all the eps at once so i could binge them or at least watch them when i wanted to, id have nothing to complain about, id be happy as a clam honestly.

funny how that works, how they try to build up expectations with these needless week long gaps and how, to their detriment, they succeed.

you know what i miss about this show?

i miss how straight forward it was.

the show feels like a disturbing dream now, where its this fragmented collection of tangents and some get discarded and some appear out of nowhere and youre like ok yeah i guess so fuck it lets roll.

like ive completely forgotten who is on what side and who fought for who on earth. i have no fucking clue at this point if the head guy at the camp knows who that woman is and / or who she was on earth. i have no clue repeat no clue why there were 4 graves dug by the tank when they only killed 3 people.

im so tired of not knowing things honestly.

oh also im tired of travis' weird texas accent.

im having fun tho but goddamned. i really might just skip this until the rest of it airs then binge because theres no way im going to remember where all the pieces are on the board after 6 days.

also sorry werent there weird monk-aliens on the other side of the planet? pretty fuckin sure i saw some weird ass monk-aliens over there. oh and some devolving bipeds. we.. we just not fucking with them anymore or something?

ok i guess i was more like 3-6 months because whatsherface is still pregnant?

but im not sure why she would comment on how much deeper campion's voice is... i guess simply because they had to explain the actors age jump?

im willing to look beyond this shit and charge it to the game but there are so many little issues like this that ignoring them is, again, exhausting.

just pulling on this fucking thread a bit more....

she flips out when they resurrect her and murders some dudes and out of nowhere the AI is like 'its all good dont sweat it just bring her to me' and shes like ohhh wow its my brother the AI whom i am completely subservient to.

really?

sorry but did we hear about this AI someplace before this? when she was a valkyrie or whatever she was on the side of the sols, no? so this AI was from after campion sr reprogrammed her but immediately after doing so he sent her to the planet but somehow she has this history with the atheist AI?

im just so fucking confused.

also as a bit of a reality check i asked myself hey, where the fuck did campion jr come from exactly and my hand to god i dont remember.

also i love how we have just totally written off paul's pet mouse.

Ended up having S1 run in the background and i couldn't pick up anything to make the first 2 episodes of S2 feel less disjointed. The third episode sorta reminds everyone that eyes are not where they should be, but whatever effect it has is fairly loose. I guess Ragnar can do more stuff and Mother can do slightly less stuff.

The above falls in the hard and soft magic in fantasy realms. S1 was in the hard realm in the sense that the world had reasonably clear boundaries and S2 is firmly in the soft camp of "who the fuck knows" what characters can do.

That's not to say that you can't break "hard" magic for dramatic effect, but it only works when done sparingly.

The writer/showrunner was born roman catholic turn atheist or something like that. Previously has used some Norse mythology, but who knows where anything goes with the series. Serpent thingies are reasonably common outside Norse mythology.

There isn't a real antonym for foreshadowing, because it's amazingly shitty literary device. Combination of confusion and explaining it after the fact is just unsatisfying 99/100 times. That's not what say Usual Suspects or Fight Club did. All of the pieces were there before the reveal. The problem arises when none of the pieces are there. It's just bad writing. Semblance of balance needs to exist.

so much iron in these words.

theres a point where indulgence breaks free of discipline and restraint and we end up with fables.

and heres the thing about fables; the overwhelming majority of them are forgotten because they are just bad prose.

and this show is death spiraling into the realm of bad prose.

the actors are struggling... valiantly. they do what they can with the material. but when you step back and look at what they are pitching, its just... its amateurish.

again, not to just trod over old ground, but i dont think a single plot reveal has actually been resolved and we get at least one, and often two or three every episode.

weird aliens? de-evolution? something seduced mother to implant a snake in her? and it lived in the crashed ship? but theres also a snake myth the mithrals believe in or something? and theres a secret signal beaming the truth into some of their heads but definitely not all of them and only on occasion?

i just want my charming story of androids populating a planet from zero back.

honestly what the fuck is this shit? im already disappointed in tomorrow nights episode and im disappointed in myself for staying in the saddle.

so lets break it down.

+ ok an element of the plot is resolved; the snake is an herbivore.

aaaaaaand then we crank out:

- omg its not her snake theres something else out there feeding it

- marcus' cult looks fucking awesome

- father is building some sort of synth thats already infected his ear with fungus

cant something just make fucking sense for once on this show?

the seasons going to end with her killing the jealous serpent because it hurt campion and whatever tf its mother is, its going to make a pissed off sound and then the credits will roll.

prove me wrong, show.

also campion just weirdly blurting out how they can transfer fathers mind into a new body while he secretly builds a new body for literally no reason is just so clumsy and amateurish.

cyborg animates and kills father -> mother has to retrieve her eyes from marcus and defeats him through the power of maternal love or some absolute shit of the horse -> uses eyes to defeat cyborg -> fathers brain goes in cyborg -> omg now father is more power than mother, what ever will happen next.

Show has definitely jumped the snake