refuserefuse's reviews

The animation and visuals are stellar. And I will forgive A LOT when I finally find a show with sharp animation.

I don't know if I will go as far as saying the show's story is a mess. It does, however, seem only to exist to create cool visuals. There is some pretense at an overall plot and given AoT I though there might be a bigger mystery revealed but so far it seems that the pretense is as far as it goes.

I think it might have worked for previous generations. It's technically serial but the badguy of the week without much else feels highly like the episodic stuff most of society has shifted away from. Not great for an overall story.

The characters are also highly annoying over and above thy typical constant drama and dysfunctional emotional regulation that is such a ubiquitous part of anime that I have to overlook it or I would have very little anime to watch. However, along with this is the animation shifts that feel totally out of place in a show that looks this solid in animation and takes itself so seriously. It would be like Castlevania doing Chibi.

But what really kills this is the exposition. I tried to shift over to the sub but it isn't any better. It's so bad it feels more like they are breaking the fourth wall to talk to us instead of each other. Like it's forcing you to have it on in the background, half-ignored. If you sit down and give it your full attention it is intolerable.

It's really unfortunate that a show that looks this great doesn't have anything else going for it but I guess thats the way it is.

I loved the first episode. A well-produced Dracula story that was a breath of fresh air with some enjoyable originality which is saying something since Dracula has been done to death. Really just about perfect, from the story to the acting to the framing to the dialogue to the art direction.

The second takes a hard left turn. It was such a hard left turn that I put it down for a long time, preferring to think of the first as 90 minute stand alone story. But I liked the first so much that I came back to it. I though that since they had shown so much originality and character in the first I should give them a chance to see what they do with this concept.

As it eventually turns out the hard left turn is the only interesting part of the second episode. For the rest though.... The writing and framing are stupid. Art direction in non-existent. The story is the Demeter but unlike the freshness and originality of the first one this one feels like a middle school play being unenthusiastically carried out for a grade. The character/gravitas/etc of Dracula are downgraded dramatically and the other great character from the first one is absent most of the episode. But it was serviceable enough that when again it seemed like the third one was going to go a new direction with it's premise I decided to continued.

The third one has a premise that really should have worked but quickly, and by quickly I mean immediately, devolves into pure stupidity. Every character is like a character from a B horror movie competing to see who can most stupidly get themselves killed. The actress from the first is back as a new character but the new character is written so ineptly that it leaves a bad taste. It got worse and worse so that I bailed a third of the way through when Dracula gets a lawyer and checked the internet to get enough spoiler to see if it gets better. It doesn't.

Give credit for trying to do something different with a time loop plot and clearly having a hamstringed budget. These could have been, and almost were, a strength. One can think of a myriad of ways to make something interesting with this taking this films failings as inspiration. Instead I've rarely seen anyone make anything so tedious and frustrating.

In effect it becomes the opposite of a time loop movie. Instead of learning from the previous loop they seem determined not to learn. Instead of doing something different to do the same thing again even though they know better. All while leaving interesting avenues that don't make the characters into idiots unexplored.

This gets worse and worse. There is a clear solution but there is an obstacle. Then later when the obstacle is removed the solution is not tried. Then later when the solution is no longer certain to work it is suddenly remembered. And at least one of the people acting so stupidly is supposedly a genius. They could just win at several points, even by their own account of what they know and for no explained reason just don't.

This gets worse and worse until the most infuriating example of this is the final scene. This act of ineptitude is clearly to set it up for a sequel but given the trajectory I can only expect any future installment to fail harder.

Like the majority of new netflix shows that start off solid they demolish (read the most aggressive expletives you can think of here) everything they have built in the latter portion of the series.

Season 1 started better than I would have guessed. Hot shot CIA protagonist that manages to barely make his way through one impossible circumstance after another mostly just from grit and persistence. The actors and characters are solid. It's about 70-80 percent spy fun with the remainder being melodrama or humor that is out of place (noninclusive of the drama or humor consistent with human interactions and believable) with the rest and almost derails the entire experience. It works and works well but somehow by the thinnest of margins. Like every episode just about there is one impassioned speech that were are supposed to believe is THE thing that gets results. It is out of place with the rest of show but at that level forgivable/ignorable.

But by the end of season 1 he goes from being a smart, hot shot to making preposterous unforced errors. Much more hapless than competent. Can't remotely keep his excrement together. The show kind of recognizes this but still wants us to think he's pulling it off but he only pulls it off because the show bends reality so it will work. The rest of the show is the same. There is a DC/government favor for-a-favor mechanic that is intriguing and believable at first then becomes ludicrous to the point that everyone would clearly be fired for incompetence. Protagonist is saved both by people and agencies doing things that it wouldn't make sense from a character perspective except for the unpredictable serendipity it will lead to for him.

The beginning of season 2 shows they are doubling down on the dumpster fire that was the end of season one. Pass.

This was one of the most perfect series I have ever seen. The actors were the characters and played the off of each other perfectly. The writers added even more humor but it was it was fitting the spirit of the book. Only one significant plot deviation but it was delightfully clever, added to the series and fit a live action version actually.

When I found this on Prime this year I was surprised it hadn't come across my radar. I watched the first season twice and gave it top marks on Prime. When the first season came out it was continually advertised on the banner. Season 2 came out year before last and hadn't even heard about it or seen it on Prime.

For the first two episodes I was flumoxed as to why Prime had so Firfly-ed this with under-promotion. For these two episodes it was still one of the few properties that could make me laugh out loud. John Ham is a brilliant addition. The plot was always going to have be invented but based on creative decisions made with the first season I had no problem with that if the same team was making them.

But by the third episode it starts messing the bed and devolves to inane levels of sitcom-ery. Aziraphale is much more hapless, naive and self-satisfied at later points in his timeline than he ever was in season one. Crowley completely looses his teeth so instead of nuance and shades of grey he is a effectively Aziraphale's puppy merely cosplaying as a demon. With his bite goes much of his humor. They drop John Ham to almost nothing for the middle episodes and only pick him back up again when they lazily come back around to finish up their neglected plot. New characters are introduced jus to be saccharine and annoying. Really its more like Care Bears than Good Omens.

If they can get more like season one and the first two episodes of season 2 then I would be excited for a season 3. But if season 3 happens I would go in braced for more disappointment.

All the characters, actors and motivations are good to start out. It feels like a grounded serious production. It cares about all its characters as people and shows their personal live events even as they are unrelated to the main plots but without getting bogged down by any of them. With one notable exception the characters are all acting like real rational, believable people.

But like most Netflix fare it all goes out the window in the final couple episodes. The characters start acting in hair-brained ways inconsistent with their previously established identity and events taking place in the show. Cops and and criminals act in ways that anyone with even the smallest amount of vicarious experience would know better than to behave. Not a spoiler, but as an analogy, kill a witness against your boss to free your boss but kill him in you boss's house. So the cops and bad guys shift from serious drama to more of a 3 Stooges genre. (unintentionally) Just pure nonsense.

Even the cinematography takes bizarre turns that don't add anything artistically to the show, are abandoned as soon as they are done and seem only executed to be jarring and incompatible with the rest of the series. Or purely farcical. (again unintentionally) Like it attempts to do style over substance on purpose but fails.

It's a BBC production so can't really blame netflix directly but it's not the first time that BBC has pulled a Netflix by selfdestructing a property in its ultimate and penultimate segments and most of the worse concluded BBC series seem to disproportionally end up on Netflix a la The Bodyguard.

Straight off it makes it out to be an intriguing spy thriller but then almost immediately takes turns as a gangster film a la Guy Ritchie.

And throughout it ruminates obsessively on one romantic relationship through flash backs and another that takes up a probably about a quarter of the screen time that feels like a lot more.

There are still more identity complexities about what the show is trying to do with itself (by the end it's a holiday film) but all this could be looked past or even make for something great if any of these genre switching stents were done well.

But they simply aren't. Take the spy aspect. All the would be spies are usually shooting themselves in the foot more than anything else. The conspiracy feels intriguing to start but instead of pulling at the threads and unraveling it, they bumble through focusing on other things and only stumble their way to its full unraveling with a lot of ex machina, impossible coincidences and tactically stupid choices that should never work out. WIth all this they manage to eek out about 50% of the explanation for the original conspiracy and then we still need a few sentences of exposition in the final moments for the last 50%.

There isn't any cohesive reality to hold this world together. They can either trace a number effortlessly or they don't even think to do it so they instead have to use a family friend as bait.

There are no smarts to this series but it's passible enough to be forgettable so that people like me will jump on the train again next time a sloppy netflix spy thriller comes around.

I thought this movie would at least be ok. Like a Man of Steel or an Aquaman. Or even at the very least a SuperMan Vs Batman .But no.

Everything about this movie is pretty to very bad except some of the acting which hardly matters because the dialogue is atrocious. The plot makes zero sense. The special effects are weak to visually bad. Even things like stage direction and camera work make baffling sub-competent choices. What's more, for being "The Flash" one of these movies "The Flash" parts are the worst parts.

Starting with the character. He is annoying needy, arrogant. The one actually causing all the screw ups with zero awareness shown that he is the source of the screw ups and instead acting like everyone else is the problem. Like, as from seen from scene 1, super fast guy is somehow, contrary to any kind of sense, always late. But on top of that he is so consistently late he expects expects other people to be ready to accommodate his lateness and then when they don't make him less late he and the film act like they are the problem.

Then the style. He starts every run like he is far more of a ponce than and an athlete or a super hero. And why exactly? He changed into his costume in a bathroom and came outside faster than the eye could see then stops in the middle of the street for no reason whatsoever except to strike a pose that is like a melodramatic actor's idea of what a figure skater posing as a runner on the starting line would look like if the figure skater had aspirations of being a ballerina.

Then the effects. Part of it is just that the effects are sub par for what where are used to these days. But then part of if is that the 2014 Days of Future Past did a much more striking and interesting job of illustrating what things are like for a fast moving person.

And the comedy. Apparently all his discount Shia Labeouf yammering is supposed to be the comic relief but it is anything but comic.

For baseline on my judgement the first 30 minutes of Madam Web were unbearable. It shapes then shapes up to be only be about 20% as bad as the first 30 minutes approaching average not great movie before it decrescendos into a lack luster and hokey end.

Flash is like 85-100% of the unbearableness of Madam Web's first 30 minutes but for the whole film.

This once brilliant show is now like Spider Man 3, the 2007 one.

Every, *single* character is going through an existential crisis that is about as well handled as the oft memed Toby Maguire strut montage. It took bit to realize it was going to be this bad because it was only 1 or 2 of them to start with, evolving over several episodes with inciters that the viewer could see. Every additional character they did it with was handled more poorly until we get MNM's breakdown that comes out of nowhere and relies the most lazy, poorly established shorthand.

It's great when a show can explore trauma in an authentic, human way. There is space for that in shows and it makes them better.

But when it's every character of the *entire* cast and devolves to the level of sophistication of PSAs and children's cartoon? Come on!

And the rest of the show goes the same. The allegory isn't even allegory any more. It was more patent in season 3 and now is completely lacking any nuance or subtlety.

There is generally solid acting, presentation and production value to make this a nominal gangster story if this is already your kind of thing, notwithstanding that it is more RockNRoller than Snatch.

If you aren't a devotee of Ritchie or an indiscriminate gangster fan you might be given more pause.

As a series in general it suffers from quite a bit of inconsistency in its characters and plots.

The draw and appeal it begins with is that of an aristocratic family thrust into the criminal drug world and the tension, conflict and peril that result.

True to the Netflix formula by the end none of this is true and they have assassinated almost all of what could have drawn one to the show in the first place.

And true to most contemporary writing the show continually ignores most of its own history as though it is normal for humans to have the memories and awareness of goldfish.

Lots of complaints that this is slow. I think the only reason is that this Poirot sort of murder mystery is typically done as a movie and that it circles around one murder. There is nothing about it plot-wise that is slow in comparison to any other typical mystery series as a benchmark.

Beane and Patinkin are great and the period mash up of it is captivating. The rest of the characters and the story are also fairly well-drawn. I don't think anyone who likes murder mysteries will find this slow or identify with complaints that there is too much dialogue and not enough action. What did they think they were watching?

However they subjectively may or may not find find it shifting uniqueness to be a detriment or benefit. It takes off like said Poirot style mystery but there is actually no way that a viewer could solve the murder even in retrospect. It avoids a lot of clichés but it does this by taking turns that similarly take surprising shifts from the type of series it seemed to be.

The result is that by the end it is a very different type of series than when it started. That sort of shift is very common in modern streaming series making them so unrecognizable that all the elements that drew you to the show are gone.

For me though this one holds together in that the characters and the larger conspiracy stay coherent (again refreshing in the modern landscape) so I found it well worth a watch even though the resolution felt a little off-brand. (despite being heavily foreshadowed)

It's a fun watch and I would be very glad to see a season 2.

Series shouldn't have taken it's name from the Brangelina movie but that's entirely beside the point.

I love Donald glover. I liked the couple/spy premise. But boy is this hard to watch.

There is a veneer of spy thriller here. A very thin one. And the comedy element is so much thinner I was literally surprised to see in the synopsis, after watching the first two episodes, the word "comedy."

Ninety plus percent of this movie is just palpably weird melodrama between the two a la their cover as a couple. I can't tell if it supposed to be funny or darkly funny or just sink or swim acclimation. The strangers having to pretend to be a couple and warming to each other has been done to death and frequently done well. But it isn't here.

John just can't seem to wrap his head around the idea that the marriage is a pretense between strangers. He is weirdly and continually trying to make it real. He's like the pitiful theater kid that gets to play Romeo opposite a high school idol and Absolutely. Can. Not. Get over it. And just be cool and professional. And that's a generous comparison vs the coworker or boss who behaves the same with less reason for pretense.

Given the premise, virtually everything he does is invasive, presumptive, wildly inappropriate and overtly unreciprocated but he just keeps going. Simply cannot make an appropriate, normal, socialized-human comment.

His obsessiveness isn't supposed to taken as creepy according to the writing. He is a deep guy who loves his mother. They try to make his bizarreness seem normal by hitting the bell over and over that Jane is afraid of connection/commitment and whatever. But GD who wouldn't recoil from this guy's clueless attentions. I haven't felt so viscerally creeped out by someone that is supposed to be the good guy protagonist since Passengers.

Jane is also weird. But given the writing it's really hard to read her weirdness as anything other than self-preservation in light of being stuck with an unstable stalker.

And from this context 90+ percent of the dialogue and situations are generated. They just keep insisting harder and harder there is chemistry between them (quite apart from insisting they are semi-competent agents) while making it harder and harder to buy apart from Stockholm syndrome or similar explanations.

In 2016 there was an almost entirely forgettable movie called "Suicide Squad."

Then "The Suicide Squad" came out in 2021 demanding that it be viewed as a reboot rather than a sequel yet weirdly with 2 of the same actors playing the same characters. On top of this weirdness the trailer (at least for someone not intimately familiar with the periphery of DC comics) made it look like they were unimaginatively replacing a Will Smith sharp shooter character with an Idris Elba sharpshooter character and a cannibalistic humanoid crocodile with a cannibalistic humanoid shark which even further seemed to telegraph a film more feckless than the first.

And then (whether because of the perceptions these marketing decision induced or covid or both or whatever) it was a box office bomb which further convinced me that it would be even more forgettable than its predecessor.

So I only finally watched in 2023 and to my delight found out it was a comic book superhero gem of a movie!

If "Guardians of the Galaxy" and "Deadpool" are 10/10s for there respective sub-sub-genres then the first 2/3s of this movie is the "Deadpool" of "Guardians of the Galaxy" with the majority of every scene, frame and line being hilarious or carnage or both while having a good dose heart that doesn't only adds without getting in the way or weighing the movie down.

The last 1/3 retains a lot of its humor while getting predictably more serious but also more dark and tragic with a fair rendition "Captain America: The Winter Soldier"'s play of what patriotism truly means.

My only critique would be that the dark and tragic go a little bit too far and therefore required a transition that would hard to make smooth enough to keep the movie from feeling a little disjointed.

But this also makes the movie unexpectedly impactful and work better as a one-off and if you ignore the throw away post-credit scene it is a perfect stand-alone movie.

So pretend box office smash "Suicide Squad" never existed and watch "The Suicide Squad" the next time you need an R rated super hero comedy that holds together. It's on Netflix Now!

With the title "Bad Therapy" as premise you could throw a stick and hit a writer that could make a passible story and with this cast of actors throw another stick and hit a director and make at least a coherent film with some good moments.

But this film supposedly has an entire true story book behind it for structure. Maybe the complete mess that this film is explains why the only evidence of this book anywhere on the internet is the film's claim to be based on it.

The more interesting story here would be the meta of how this film came to be. How do decent actors get involved in a film based on a book that was never allowed to see the light of day? Did they read a script that made sense? Did the script, direction etc. Keep changing throughout the film?

Where the actors sometimes give good performances it's as if they read scripts but got entirely different directing notes and only had one take to get the scene right. One comes in playing the comedy straight man to the other's unhinged Lifetime character, so the scene doesn't function for any type of genre.

So if you want a film that is like 6 different bad films with the same actor spliced together like a really unfunny, undramatic mad lib then this is for you.

Always good, more often great and frequently masterful Blue Eye Samurai sets itself apart from Netflix fare, anime in general and even at times from itself as it uniquely executes each episode.

Everything about this is just so evidently well done that it either shines unhindered or so exemplary that it makes my reevaluate what I think I like.

The dialogue, my lord. Today's productions are so cliche and wrote that one begins to anticipate at least the shape of most every sentence that is about to be said. It is so ubiquitous that I have lost awareness that I am even doing it. That is until something like this comes along and I realize I have zero idea of what is about to be said, or think I do and then am completely wrong. All the while being so original and artful that it is a cognitive and auditory delight.

Of course the voice acting, much vaunted just as it should be, enhances the dialogue even more. Nearly every character is a stand out on their own, from Masi Oka to Goerge Takai to Kenneth Branagh and including characters that I didn't ever think I could see take seriously such as Brenda Song and Randall Park, the former being entitled yet eminently grounded and sympathetic and the latter being the most perfect sycophant.

In the first of my two prejudices, the voice pitch and drawn features of the main protagonist Mizu, by Maya Erskine, initially struck me as severe and unpleasant. But it quickly becomes obvious that it is appropriate and essential that they be so, making it all the more gripping and meaningful when they deviate.

The voice acting and dialogue are so well tuned that relationships and interaction between characters feel authentic and natural in a way most shows miss. New companions go degree by degree from formality and awkwardness when strangers to genuine warmth and devotion over time, mirroring my own experience and orientation toward the characters. Interactions between rivals are duals of intellect, as though there are real individuals trying to divine each other rather than just actors saying lines.

The fight sequences are equally clever. They feel fresh with sophisticated action choreography and cinematography that outshines most big screen martial action entrees. Sometimes quite gory as one might expect but often measured and never repetitive or generic.

In my second prejudice, I don't know what you would call this animation style, but I know, or at least thought a I knew, that I don't like it. But where I have eschewed other anime just for having this art style, subtle differences here that I couldn't even point to, beautifully captivate and pull me along, like realizing water color can actually be amazing the first time you see a master's work.

I don't think Netflix has had something this original and well-produced in years. For my personal taste, which might not match all, the last time I was so happily surprised by the thorough quality of a Netflix property was the first season of The Witcher. If this doesn't get a second season I will be starting the petition of no one beats me to it.

You know. How zombies don't really matter and just show up ad hoc whenever the intrahuman melodrama and conflict needs interrupted to extend the melodrama and conflict eternally.

The first season was pretty good and one of the things that encouraged me to stick with ATV+. Unoriginal but well produced and the different character points of view gave a lot of dynamics without sacrificing the plot and enhancing it when they intersect well.

But they didn't even make it through the first season without the human's setting on each other for contrived reasons. BTW armed military convoys are taken out effortlessly by impromptu redneck mad maxers and gun happy hippy activists.

So I guess it's no surprise that season 2 doubles down on both of these.

"Trevante struggles with returning to day-to-day life." Sorry, what now? Tevante, the first contact soldier? Day-to-day life? In the middle of an alien invasion that is desperate and planet-wide?

I liked the character building in season 1 for which so many said it was slow. But now it just all adds up to tepid human melodrama and weak contrived human conflict.

Apart from this there were also several just pointlessly stupid moments even in season 1. Like used google to just find the most inaccurate way to represent something to best draw the ire of professionals watching the show. Radial bifurcation for child nose bleed anyone?

And now in season 2, the new characters introduced are immediately tedious. One has all the gravitas of Bruce Campbell. The others are 2 dimensional caricatures.

Also, who convinced the streamers it was a good idea to go back to dolling out episodes weekly after we had barely moved past that?

Better to have a coherent, well planned middling show than one reduced to pure garbage from creators rashly pulling out all the stops as they fail to divine what viewers want based on their weekly data.

So let's see if they can get me to drop my opinion more by whatever desperate thing they do next week based on this week's reception.

TLDR This show has a lot going for. Acting, world building, production value. Ironically, for a series based on successful books and created by people who can presumably grasp meaning from written words, what is not only weak but a complete detriment to the show, is/are the plot(s).

Getting this out of the way. Who cares about gender/race changes (especially for a robot. Good grief!) If they hadn't made changes it would have been effectively an entirely male main cast. If that seems less objectionable to you than making making 3 characters female...

On the flip side all those who are snowed over by Lee Pace and CGI and pretending all the criticism comes from the bigot camp (or even the biblio-faithful) are equally off-base.

I get it. It is exciting to have new epic sci-fi. But just being novel doesn't make it good. This is NOT the next The Expanse or Raised by Wolves just because it isn't Star Trek or Star Wars.

Before reading the books

If I hadn't seen trailers, heard rave reviews and ran across this on the SciFi channel I would have thought it was a solid 6 then become gradually disenchanted and frustrated. But I did see trailers and it had a ton of hype so I didn't go in with low expectations that would have let the show's Awe Factor overwhelm me for a few episodes. But I hadn't read the books and think I went in with pretty neutral expectations. So I think un-agenda-ed un-bombed un-inflated range is 4 +/- 2.

But 4 episodes in i felt I had to stop and read the books because nothing made sense.

In the first episode for example the uber genius Hari Seldon explains in detail with examples what psychohistory is: a calculated prediction of the future history of society and populations, NOT individuals, that may be mitigated or augmented but is inexorable. Apparently the whole series will revolve around this. And then in the very same episode and all future episodes the plot runs directly counter to every stated aspect of this theory. It is applied to individuals. It is anything but inexorable and needs constant meddling, remarkable feats - again from individuals - and the purest luck.

Uber genius Hari Seldon also believes "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" scoffing at it but then he and all of his ilk seem not only to be helpless without violence but to go out of their way to favor it as a course of action. Sure this could be character failing that is examined, but it isn't because it is just a thing the writers say and then forget and it means nothing afterwards because there is no continuity.

It's like starting a show talking about how gravity works and then in all future episodes having people floating around with no explanation or acknowledgement.

Hmm. Is Apple+ applying the goldfish memory from Ted Lasso to its writers team?

If this kind of internal incoherence doesn't bother you, do be aware that it gets more egregious and ubiquitous. This is just pointing out it is ignoring its stated concepts from go.

Compounding this continual inconsistency was boatload of stuff that felt like weak, obligatory (but definitely not necessary) character background forced in or for economy of actors reasons.

E. G. Gaal has disavowed the religion on her backwater planet. They were going to kill her because she could "done read good" after all. But then when she gets to a secular world where she is safe and valued for her intellect the ONE thing she desperately wants to do is go see a priest of this religion.

And she visits him to...I mean she isn't regretful or conflicted or seeking. She ask a question that any follower, present or former, should have known the answer for long before they had occasion to ask it. Apparently she just makes the journey there for him to yell at her.

And this priest. Initially portrayed as the irrelevant priest of the single church of the religion in this planet-wide city a couple episodes later is a person of great power and following, whom even the secular emperor tolerates and consults.

After reading the books.

After watching the first season and reading the books I find the books have some of their own problems with plot and characters. But what has made them loved is the grand sweeping concepts and time line. The Seldon Plan is the guiding plot device and every era and crisis hinges on it.

First of all it clearly should have been an anthology. The book is. Anthologies are doing fairly well now. Apple+ doesn't have one (as far as I know). But for economy of actors or lack of faith in the source material or audience or maybe wanting to inflate 3 compact books into 8 seasons, they didn't.

Secondly, this story has no Seldon, no Seldon plan and no Foundation, no Salvor etc. If you like the show and are wound up over the nerds trashing on it so much, the show couldn't have been more perfectly designed to raise the ire of those who liked the books.

The show's Seldon isn't a doomed visionary of the past but ever present, vain, cowardly demigod. This would make The Plan completely irrelevant but The Plan as the show has it was never relevant to begin with. And the Foundation's members are effectively bumpkins instead of the last vestige of the competent physical scientists gathered from across the galaxy. Salvor isn't a careful thinker and observer who solves problems with subtle cleverness but a discount thug. (but not one without her own tedious angst)

This also shed's light in why everything about Gaal felt so forced. She is an invented character. For that matter so is the show's Hari Seldon and Cleon but for them it just manifests as unstable erraticism that I initially took for intentional plot elements rather than poor writing.

No reason invented characters could not have been good and rational. Just that these aren't and part of the explanation as to why is that they are unrelated to the book depending on writers who clearly never even understood the book as a starting point, so the odds that they can write a good character when they can't read or comprehend well...

Apart from having no themes from the book and the themes that it does have running directly counter to the spirit of the book the show also just makes self-defeating choices with the plot elements.

In one case, a reveal/plot arc that comes late in the story is shoved into the beginning like a square peg through a round hole, deleting a great element of the future story. It could have been modified to another invented but interesting parallel plot but they just turn it into a slog that introduces the necessity of utterly inane time-killing filler for many episodes. I think this is significantly related to why many who haven't read the book comment on the show's slowness.

In yet another bizarre choice they rip off elements from Arthur C. Clarke's stories like they are confused even about whose material the are adapting.

I am not sure who this is for. For anyone who likes well-done stories this one is so gutted without any suitable replacement that it has very little substance and less that is coherent. This goes more so for people who like epic science fiction and more so yet again for people who like Asimov's Foundation series.

Maybe those who are real thirsty for novelty and Lee Pace?

This is really starting to seem like it is Peacock's thing. Pick an underrated but top tier actress, give them the lead, and then pick writers and supporting actors from the bottom of the barrel.

My first time watching anything staring Betty Gilpin I find that she is one of the most dynamic expressive actors I have ever seen. I'll also give some credit to the directing as well for making sure to elicit and capture this.

The world is campy and comedic, nonsensical, over the top, surreal and creepy genera mashup and manages to keep a fair bit of a genuinely intriguing mystery about it.

So the show should have a fair bit going for it.

But the supporting cast. It is such a blatant and consistent upside down mishmash that it seems more like nepotism than incompetence. Good actors playing better written characters receive the smallest amount of time over just a few episodes. Tepid characters show up regularly. And the most intolerable character permeates every episode.

As much of a bright, comedic character as Simone is, Wiley is the exact opposite and sucks the energy out of every scene he is in. I will blame the writers here as well, who are trying to write Wiley as some repugnant neanderthal character for comedy sake but also make him sympathetic among other contradictions, untenable even in a surrealist comedy.

Unlike other parts of the show his over-the-top is rarely funny and almost always massively dated but not in a fun retro way. So you just end up with a ******* ******** who you want to die from go and not even in a satisfying way but offscreen so you can pretend he was never in the show.

So if the casting apart from Simone isn't driving you insane by episode 2 you can pretty much count on the show to get no better or worse as it continues.

What really kills this (apart from fandom outrage over season 2 and the general direction of the show being so bad that it lost Cavill as its anchor) is that the story was just a dog's lunch. In fact, it really had just about everything else going for it except the story.

It has the same high production value and action choreography as the Witcher seasons. The actors performances were surprisingly exemplar, even for the neglected characters, elevating many lines and scenes that shouldn't have worked and making so many passible ones really good. This alone leaves me forever sad that I will never see more of their characters, especially Brown's and Mills's. The directing and dialogue don't suck. Its other flaws would have been in the acceptable range for a good show.

But despite all it has going or it, it still feels a lot like a CW show. This is somewhat explained by learning it has the same people behind it as the actual CW show, "The Originals", and the somehow even more infamous Netflix, "Iron Fist". These were the people someone gave the creative writing class assignment of "Write a prequel for the Witcher in four episodes" when the direction of the beloved series was already under heavy criticism.

So we get just a lot of really campy story telling elements that in no way belong in epic fantasies that we are meant to take seriously. This begins by using Jaskier to set up the flashback intro, clearly relying on this link and another intended ear worm to help carry the story. Just omitting this flashback, its other bookend and the punctuated narration throughout, which keeps reminding you that it happened, would have made the story a lot more palatable.

This setup is made all the more cringy by Jaskier, with the audience's self-awareness, pointing out how trite the setup is, only to be won over by learning it will include the origin of the first Witcher and the Conjunction of the Spheres. Both of these key selling points, however, will turn out to be both boring and nonsensical. Like if you asked how Egyptians learned to make the Pyramids and the answer was that they always knew how to make the Pyramids from stone and earth and how to make stone and earth from wood.

Mixed in throughout are just really amateur decisions on basic story telling choices. The apropros-of-nothing disembodied big bad, sounds like a kind second grade teacher and also a lot like the benevolent narrator. A ruler sends like a round 3/4 of a dozen soldiers to conquer new lands making it seem like awkward stage play. Also, just lots of bizarre misses and omissions for already established elements as though the writers hadn't watched the previous installments, let alone read the books.

It's not as though creatives can't come up with a good original story. It happens kinda regularly. But this one is clearly part of the epidemic passing through Netflix, Disney+ Prime etc. Wherein their nominal creatives confuse the success brought to them by source material or previous creatives, with their own genius and then thinking they can to better. Just killing one promising intellectual property after another.