Hi there!
It’s Tuesday! I like to watch
TV!
That brings us to the Tuesday
TV Touchbase!
What have I been watching on
TV?
I gotta say, the TV watching
schedule for my wife Andrea and I is quite full. Sunday, we have Doctor Who on at the same
time as the Batwoman/Supergirl match up over on the CW.
We also have Stumptown, Young
Sheldon, Perfect Harmony and The Good Place.
And when The Good Place is
over, we’ll have Brooklyn Nine Nine back in rotation.
It looks Perfect Harmony is over. Last Thursday was its season finale and given it's lousy ratings, probably it's series finale.
It looks Perfect Harmony is over. Last Thursday was its season finale and given it's lousy ratings, probably it's series finale.
And as I write this, we still
haven’t finished season three of The Crown. (Just two episodes to go!)
So adding yet another series to our itinerary seems a bit problematic with our packed schedule.
So adding yet another series to our itinerary seems a bit problematic with our packed schedule.
But I’ll be damned if that is
what I did.
Actually, we added two!
A few weeks back, while our
daughter Randie was still at home at the Fortress of Ineptitude, she bugged us to
go ahead and sign up for Disney+.
She wanted to watch Coco
before she went back to college.
After that and she went back to college, I figured “Hell, I have Disney+! Damn it! I’m going to watch the Mandolorian!”
As I’ve noted in this space before, when it comes to science fiction fandom, for me Star Wars ranks below Doctor Who and Star Trek.
It’s like Doctor Who., Star
Trek, some other things I might like and somewhere down the list, Star Wars.
But….
“Hell, I have Disney+! Damn it!
I’m going to watch the Mandolorian!”
The Mandolorian is Star Wars
for people who don’t like Star Wars. It’s set in the dirtier, grungier edges of
the Star Wars universe.
It’s Stumptown but with space
ships and a dude in a helmet.
Seriously, the Mandolorian
NEVER takes off his helmet. Anyone who suggests he takes off his helmet gets a
dirty look. How do you give someone a dirty look while wearing a face covering
helmet? The Mandolorian manages to do it.
The title character is a helmet
wearing bad ass bounty hunter. He’s terse, acerbic and really can’t be bothered
with your bullshit. He’s just trying to make a living as a bounty hunter in a galaxy
where making any kind of living is kind of hard.
Props to a Star Wars property that actually name checks “Life Day”, the Star Wars holiday at the center of the infamous Star Wars Christmas TV special.
Props to a Star Wars property
that shows us what a toilet looks like in the Star Wars universe.
And yes, most definitely, props to a Star Wars property that gives us Baby Yoda.
OK, I missed out on being surprised
by Baby Yoda’s reveal but damn! I was not prepared for just how frickin’ cute
Baby Yoda is!!
Everybody may be trashing
Rise of Skywalker but the Mandolorian and Baby Yoda will save Star Wars!
Andrea and I are doling out
an episode a week before Sunday’s new Doctor Who episode.
Next up new on our list is
Star Trek: Picard.
This one is very important to
Andrea and I,
From the beginning of our relationship,
Star Trek: The Next Generation was our jam. But this corner of the Star Trek
universe has been untouched since the cinematic misfire of Nemesis. Any new Star
Trek since then has been prequels and reboots.
While Star Trek: Picard is
rooted in the nostalgic appeal to fans like Andrea and I, it represents the first
chance in almost two decades to move Star Trek forward and outward.
If Star Trek: Picard is going
to move Star Trek forward, however, it’s going to take it’s time doing it.
If you’re looking for Jean Luc
Picard to stand on the bridge of a starship and tell a helmsman to “Engage!”,
you will have to wait.
Picard has long since retired from Starfleet with not a lot of good feelings left for the organization that was his home for most of his life.
Seems Romulus is about to get fried by it's sun going supernova. Picard convinces the Federation to help the Romulans escape their planet before the supernova hits. But in a move of feckless short-sightedness and cowardice, the rescue operation is called off.
The Federation does have another bee in its bonnet, as it were. All of the living crew and all the facilities at the Utopia Planitia Shipyards on Mars are utterly destroyed by an attack of androids, androids developed by one Bruce Maddox of the Daystrom Institute. (Maddox first appeared in the 2nd season ST:TNG episode "The Measure of a Man" as a cybernetic expert looking to replicate Data.) As a result of this catastrophe, synthetic life forms and any development or research into the creation of synthetic life forms in the Federation are all forbidden.
Picard is hanging out in his vineyard in France, in his own words, "waiting to die".
Then a remarkable woman named Dahj comes into his life and Picard once more has a mystery to solve, a mission, a new purpose.
Except for a few action sequences, the pace on the first episode is slow, deliberate, almost languid. Jean Luc is an old man, with a long and exemplary career behind marred by his most significant failures and the failures of the institutions that Picard had dedicated his life to.
This time we find Jean Luc Picard is not Gene Roddenberry's utopian ideal of the future. But if Picard the man and the series has anything to say about, that ideal will live again.
Elsewhere on CBS All Access are Short Treks. Andrea and I watched one called Children Of Mars that ties in to Star Trek Picard. It's the story of two school age girls who have an acrimonious relationship. They find common ground in grief and shock when their respective parents working at the Utopia Planitia Shipyards on Mars are among the day from the attack of the synthetics. It is a quiet character piece that underscores the affect this betrayal has on the people of the federation.
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