Topic: What's your favourite TV program of the moment?

[goldshirt*9]

Is Picard any good,
Believe the first season is over and may binge watch ?

[8ullfrog]

Not over, still a two episode season finale due.

I watched the first one and had pain symptoms, so I've held off.

I've heard it's very CBS trek, and the first episode had some serious problems. Such as, if these ninjas can beam into any apartment they want, why throw a knife into the targets boyfriend when a phaser set on stun has been an option for over 200 years? said exotic boyfriend knew jack poo, and the ninjas are all wearing masks.

But yeah, the boyfriend of a character we don't even know the name of gets a friggin knife in the heart while engaging in 24th century Netflix and chill.

I'll warn you, I've heard very little good about PICARD, and most of it is incidental. It seems almost to scold you for ever enjoying Star Trek, and the utopia we've always been presented in prior series is obviously long dead.

A lot of people give Picard poo for his "privilege" which honestly, I wish died on tumblr. Oh, and poverty and racism are back. It's also worth noting that at this point, Jean Luc Picard is 97 years old.

As to my prior comment about Stargate Season 9, the baddies of the season, the Priors of the ORI, are a bit like bible salesmen, with a bit of showmanship. They cure the sick, heal the lame, all that good stuff.

And if you DON'T buy in to origin, they plague your planet so everyone will die. And the newly reformed SG-1 has to deal with that very heavy poo.

I forgot to mention, Picard opens with a HELL of a nostalgia hook for people who loved TNG. It's like a sugar pill for the bitter reality of the show to come.

I'd love to see a hopeful science fiction series. There were times in BSG where it felt like I, the viewer, was causing pain to the cast, simply by watching.

Like I was that sick SAW fucko.

I think even the most upbeat episode of BSG has like, all their fighter pilots die horribly in a weapons transfer accident.

[6pairsofshoes]

About Stargate Season 9...

My husband is not much of a Sci Fi fan.  I usually watch the show late at night, alone. 
We are watching Better Call Saul, which is remarkably good for a spinoff.

[8ullfrog]

I was trying to read the los pollos hermanos menu when I found out it's a real restaurant called twisters. The've got a decent variety of stuff to choose from.

I actually haven't seen much since Jimmy was working for another firm. I had read he managed to screw that up, but I haven't had cable for quite a while.

[6pairsofshoes]

We don't have cable.  Just watched the TP Boys crew go back into jail at the end of another season.  They're perpetual optimists who see the good in everything.  Jail is pretty cool.  Now even Bubble is in the joint, but they let him have his kitty, so he's enjoying life inside. 

[6pairsofshoes]

On amazon prime:  The Fat and the Angry.  Swedish language thriller series with flashbacks told of corrupt gangs and nefarious dealings in Sweden with a host of unsavory characters.  The black humor is pretty entertaining although at 1 hr and a half per episode, it takes a bit of commitment.

[8ullfrog]

Hey six, to try and draw you back into S9 of SG-1, they do a Yojimbo where it's possible NO ONE in the flashback is guilty.  (sadly it had already been done on TNG) (And Voyager) (Why the golly do they recycle stuff like that?) (Ds9 once jammed 20 years of hard labor prison into O'Brien's head, but that didn't count)

[6pairsofshoes]

I watched ep 1 season 2 of Altered Carbon tonight.  Lots of fisticuffs and it got pretty stabby at times.  I barely remember the first season but it had a more wistful and nostalgic air to it.  This one is more like, "got testosterone?"  I think I'm not in the target demographic.  I may stick it out.  I mean, unlike most women, I find the Three Stooges pretty funny.  I don't know what that says about my taste, but I put up with a good deal of crappy tv.  They should have an Altered Carbon bloopers tape.  That would be entertaining.  A bunch of ninjas and yakuza missing kicking the poo out of one another and yucking it up.

I just was not in the mood for SG1 tonight.  I slept through an episode of Downtown Abbey tonight and felt like watching some late tv.  Westworld seems to have evolved into a sweeping catfight between two beautiful women robots/simulants:  one blonde who has a chip on her shoulder the size of Cleveland and who thinks she should wipe out humanity vs gorgeous woman of African descent who is more tempered and humane.  She's not so vicious but can be if necessary.  Which one will win out?  It's fun to look at the sets and the costume changes.  There's some gorgeous modern architecture in the first episode.  And bonus appearance by Aaron Paul.  He's out of Breaking Bad and The Path, so now onto being unwitting robot lady's helper, I guess.

p.s.  8ully, do you mean Rashomon?  That's the Kurosawa film that consists of flashbacks describing a rape and murder while people sit at the Rashomon (the Western gate of Kyoto) taking shelter during a rainstorm.  Every one narrating has a different version of the story and of course nobody is guilty, or at least each of the accused asserts their innocence.

[8ullfrog]

Tessa Thompson? She's got reason to be mad. Her real self got killed off, and the blonde walked around in a robot duplicate of her body. I'd hold a grudge too.

I didn't actually watch Westworld season 2, it was intentionally confusing because viewers on reddit figured out the first season in two episodes, and made the writers feel stupid. So Season 2 is like a writers middle finger to an audience, not exactly a ringing endorsement.

You're completely right about Rashomon, I've no damn clue why I mixed that one up.

I can understand being put off Season 9 of SG-1, it's probably my least favorite season, I'd probably chop everything BUT the soldier that bores you. Even Teal'cs political subplot leaves you begging for a system lord to just blow them all to hell. I literally fast forwarded through them. Jaffa, crap soldiers, crap politics.

Seriously, no clue why my brain farted out Yojimbo there. I meant Rashomon.

Maybe I was mixing up that weird Bruce Willis Western and BASIC? Both are American remakes of the associated films. I don't remember what the bruce willis one was called, but it's got Christopher walken in it.

[6pairsofshoes]

Several Kurosawa films were remade as Westerns, I think of Sergio Leone, but several other directors were involved.  I looked it up on Wikipedia.  Here's the link:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remakes_of_films_by_Akira_Kurosawa

I was thinking of Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter, which sort of reminded me of  Yojimbo, and the related Fistful of Dollars.  It's been years since I've seen either one of them.  I used to like these movies.  I think I saw some of them on tv with my Dad, so it's been ages.

I didn't realize that Tessa-the blonde had been appropriated from a real person.  That helps.  I just remember the blonde robot in the park had a family, a father and a boyfriend, that she loved.  So she grows angrier when they are killed off and she can't manage to extract them from the cycle of massacres by visitors.  She was real at some point?  I don't remember that.

[8ullfrog]

Tessa Thompson is not the blonde. Also, I have a bad habit of referring to the actors by their names instead of the characters.

S1 Delores went from NPC to ENDBOSS. Then she went from ENDBOSS to killing the creator of the park. The recap video I watched said that was unplanned.

Seems you're remembering early Delores. Her dad found a selfie, and that's what started the bots going berzerk. There were a bunch of cool theories about it being an image macro, some form of program, but nope!  Just couldn't handle a times square selfie!

later on I'll see if I can find the recap video I watched. It was lovely, and made me decide to stop watching the show. The writers are dicks.

[6pairsofshoes]

Yeah.  I was thinking of Dolores.  Good name.  Griefs or sadnesses.  I vaguely remember a young woman who was a gunslinger and her father was some higher up in the corporate hierarchy of the agency who ran the park.  The first season is sort of fuzzy in my memory.  I'm kind of casting around at loose ends for stuff to watch.  I can't watch stuff my husband likes by myself at night (because it would deplete the supply of stuff we could watch together), so I'm relegated to sci fi stuff he would hate and other oddities.

I haven't read the book and can't recall if the original series was a televised version of a book or if the book came after.  So I have no reference point to know how much has been manipulated off the script.  I guess it would be a quick read.  I've seen a zillion copies in used book stores and I'm pretty sure I'd have little trouble finding a digital version.  I'm almost finished with the current read:  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (it isn't).  It's entertaining enough to finish but far from compelling.

p.s.  I just found the book. Not surprised to find it's by Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, another work I've read.  It's also sort of interesting to see the parallels:  technology plans extraordinary amusement park using cutting edge tech and it goes horribly wrong.  If I remember correctly, Crichton was trained as a physician but decided to go another direction, a fact that might account for his keen insights into the tech that is so misdirected. 

No matter how much you think you've planned to make something foolproof, there's always some odd thing you could not have foreseen that pops up to make a mess out of things.

[6pairsofshoes]

I read Westworld.  It was like a cobbled together screenplay of the movie.  Odd.  And it just describes a single day where a few visitors to the park enjoy themselves briefly before the robots go rogue and people start getting killed.  One guy manages to escape but for how long?  The end.  I was amazed it was so short.

So, whatever they're doing with the television show now, there's considerable room for invention.  Unless there's another more comprehensive book out there.  I haven't seen the original movie with Yul Brenner, et al, but I'm assuming it's faithful to the minimal screenplay that was published.  If anyone can shed any further light on this, feel free.

[6pairsofshoes]

Most* of Michael Crichton's books are.

*I say most, as I haven't read them all, but all of those that I have read.

Jurassic Park read like a novel and included information that was more developed than what I saw in the theatre.  It was not great literature, but an enjoyable read.  Westworld looked as if some functionary in the movie company glued together a script and sent it off to the publishers.  But that's as far as my exposure goes. 

I can't say why I read Jurassic Park.  Like several other less that stellar books I've read, some things just came my way, via a cheap used book sale at a public library or they were sitting in a box on the curb, or were in one of the Little Free Libraries.

Westworld was an ebook that I located relatively easily online.

[8ullfrog]

Michael Crichton wrote for the screen, and was good at it.

Fun story, Robert Ludlum started writing books to get OUT of the script game. When they tried to get him to rewrite the film "The Osterman weekend" he told them to golly off.

Every PDF version I've ever found of Osterman weekend is format bent. I tried listening to the book on tape version once, but my brain wandered too much.

Jurassic Park was a highly technical book, I feel like some of it was better than the movie, but overall Spielberg won that fight. The sequel book was straight up written to try and get the second movie made.

How do you feel about Clancy?